Webware

Most of us remember mix tapes as those carefully curated cassettes that collected our favorite music together into one 90-minute playlist. Ask a DJ about mix tapes, however, and you'll hear about a whole other side to the art, involving matched beats, seamless crossfades, and other nuances of literally mixing music together. If you're looking for an alternative to mix tape sites such as Muxtape and Mixwit, ThisIsMyJam offers people a way to create mix tapes that emphasize the science of blending songs together.

Based off of the Musical Brain API, ThisIsMyJam allows you to create interwoven music mixes that take into account song attributes such as tempo, key, timbre, genre, and more. There are plenty of drawbacks, such as a limited selection of music, no direct song uploads, and a maximum song playback duration of 20 seconds, but despite these limitations, ThisIsMyJam illustrates a novel approach.

Surprisingly, we found the appeal of ThisIsMyJam to be its degree of difficulty. It's one thing to throw together an iTunes playlist, but creating an overlapping mix of music requires some trial and error. It took us more than a few tries to come up with a mix that didn't make us cringe during discordant song transitions, but the process of reexamining the mix, removing duds, and adding new songs made the final result feel more creative than simply throwing a playlist together and hitting enter.

At the end of the two-step ThisIsMyJam process, the resulting mix comes with its own static URL, a dynamic "Latest Mix" URL, and code for embedding the mix into your own Web site (illustrated above).

Via CreateDigitalMusic.

At its annual Lotusphere conference, IBM on Wednesday showed off an early version of Lotus Mashups, a tool designed to let businesspeople, rather than professional programmers, quickly assemble Web applications.

The application will let people combine, or mash up, data from enterprise applications and the Web. It uses a browser-based visual tool and a set of pre-built widgets for displaying information.

It is scheduled to be released in the middle of this year.

IBM has been pursuing the idea of giving end users in businesses powerful enough tools to build their own applications.

These Web applications may be relatively simple and only be used for a short time. But IBM executives have said that it represents a significant business opportunity for its Lotus collaboration software division.

For example, a person could build a mashup that combines weather information with a retail management system to adjust inventories based on project weather patterns.

IBM first started with end user-driven software development when it introduced QEDWiki two years ago, a product with a similar goal.

Lotus Mashups will use the QEDWiki technology, which IBM's Emerging Technology group first developed, but it will be a separate commercial product, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM's collaboration technologies.

"We want to push the potential of mashups into the business domain," Heintzman said. "We expect to put forward no only catalogs of widgets but catalogs of mashups."

Heintzman said he thought it could be possible that in the future, IT departments will analyze the applications created by end users and "harden" them for broader deployment within companies.

Last year at Lotusphere, IBM introduced other products inspired by Web 2.0-style consumer applications, including Lotus Connections, social-networking software for businesses.

Updated at 9:15 AM PT with comments from IBM. Screen shots added.

Microsoft started an open beta program for its consumer-oriented mashup builder Popfly on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Popfly is a hosted application that enables people to assemble mashups by dragging and dropping components, rather than writing code. It's built with Microsoft's Silverlight Web browser plug-in.

When Microsoft released the alpha in May, it had prebuilt "blocks," or connections, to popular Web sites Flickr and MySpace.

Now it integrates with Facebook and people can create gadgets (also called widgets) that run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

There are a growing number of these do-it-yourself Web authoring tools, including Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes. Here's a link to a review of three of those.

For business users, IBM has developed QEDWiki and Coghead, and other companies have created hosted application development services.

Zude, a new Web site by Fifth Generation Systems (5g), lets you make a collage of all your favorite items from the Web and present them in one spot.

The site took down its password-only entrance and went into "soft launch" last week. In other words, it's testing the waters to see who in the public sphere will find and use it.

And I'm just not sure who that is.

Similar to Paggi.com, Zude allows you to create your own, personalized Web pages or profile page--called a "Zudescape"--with text, photos, videos, audio files, widgets, gadgets, Web sites and feeds. As of now, the company is offering registered users an unlimited amount of pages.

Viewing access to your pages can be granted to the general public, limited to you only, or limited to Zude users designated by you.

The nice thing about Zude is that it offers the type of freedom many people probably wish their MySpace or Facbook pages allowed.

But the site is a little busy at first glance and may intimidate the average user.

It also took some time to figure out exactly how its page-building tools work. Zude currently works with Firefox and Internet Explorer, with support for the Safari and Opera Web browsers in the works. However, you must modify your browser to allow pop-ups from the Zude.com site and download the Zude extensions in order for the tool to work. No, really. The drag-and-drop feature that allows you to add objects to your pages will not work at all unless you make a pop-up exception for the site and download the software.

Even then, the site does take some getting used to, and adding content beyond the immediate offerings is very tricky.

This is one of those sites we'll probably check back with in a few months to see where it's gone after some deep, public user-testing and, based on user recommendations, some tinkering with the interface.