Web 2.0 + Remix Culture = Web Remix 

Have you heard about "Web 2.0"? How about the "Remix Culture"? Basically, these two buzzwords refer to the discipline of taking existing content, slicing it, shuffling it, and mixing it together with other content to create a new interpretation.

According to Jonathan Boutelle, "The heart of Web 2.0 is about being able to remix and integrate without a negotiation, without permission even. It’s about being able to take an rss feed or an open API or data scraped from an XHTML website and grab that data, jam it together with another data source of the same kind, and build something new."

In practice, most content is not available as an rss feed, or an API, it must be scraped. Thus, web scraping is at core of this new paradigm and Velocityscape is leading the way.

The web is full of opportunities for remix.  Most famously, it seems, Paul Rademacher scraped real estate listings from Craigslist and mixed it with Google Maps to create HousingMaps.  Velocityscape used Web Scraper Plus to scrape Google Ads and Results and reversed the search to create GoogSpy.com, a competitive intelligence tool for online marketers. When hurricane Katrina struck, Velocityscape extracted data from 12 survivor website and united them under one search, Katrina.velocityscape.com.  

Mixing content together is really pretty easy.  Finding the right question is really the key. “The fascinating thing about web remix is that you start out with a simple question like ‘What adwords do my competitors buy?’ and you mix the data together to answer that question, but once you get there you realize that there are so many more questions that can be answered with the new data.  It surprises us more often than not.”