A Mashup Maker is an assembly environment for composing and running mashups. This ecosystem component is provisioned with collections of Widgets to enable the assembly of a variety of application domain specific mashups.

One of the most over used terms in this next wave of the internet is the word Widget. In some cases a Widget pertains to a component in the assembly of a graphical user interface (GUI). For example, an HTML Button is a UI Control that can be referred to as a Widget. In the Web 2.0 context, we have the example of Yahoo! Widgets which represent a collection of elaborate JavaScript based UI Controls for the creation of rich interactive applications. Additionally, we have Microsoft's Gadgets which are widgets that fuel Windows Live. The variety of Widgets continues with the entrance of Ajax Personalities and the host of interactive UI  controls they offer.

In 2000, Web Services as defined by SOAP and WSDL was only just emerging. The objective back then was to enable the proliferation of data by simplifying integration with legacy and proprietary applications to unleash access to information. In a nut shell the object of Web Services was to define and publish a programmatic facade around content.

As I mentioned in my previous posting, I will dedicate a few blog entries to my description of the core elements of the mashup ecosystem.

At the base of the ecosystem stack of elements is Content. Information (or Content as these terms are used interchangeably on Wikipedia) can be free or for fee. It can reflect opinions, computations, analytics, you name it.