One key beauty of the internet, amongst so many other, is that with very low costs of creating and distributing content, global creativity has exploded.

Blogs and wikis (as in Wikipedia) are the most visible written part of this creativity unleashed.

Music from completely unknown bands get exposure, specially through social networking sites as MySpace.

Youtube exhudes video creativity a plenty, some of it original! And it is becoming an even more important channel of distribution.

Image is another field of creativity. Flickr and Caedes display zillions of quality pictures, and Gimp or Photoshop software allow economical retouching of pictures.

And due to the myriad of propositions, creativity is detaching itself from some legal constraints (copyright and similar) that limited mainstream distributed, some breaches are virtually impossible to persecute. Let me clarify: I am not advocating here for free for all and piracy rules. But creativity benefits enormously from the exchange amongst minds. One of the most interesting expression of this new wave of content is mashups, pieces that combine content from more than one source.

I will link here to three examples of mashups, so you can get a feeling of the power it has:

The web mashup, where a combination of Google Maps + Other data creates interesting solutions. The one I link to is very simple, but it is a drawing of the London Tube over a realistic Google Map of London with zoom and all the bells and whistles.

The music mashup: Ever wondered what would happen if the Beatles and Metallica formed a band together? (Ok, many of you might have better things than considering this sort of ideas) Worry no more, just go to Beatallica to get an idea of what would happen. The music is here, with all the lyrics and titles picking up from a song from each band. Examples:

Sgt. Hetfield’s Motorbreath pub band
A Garage Dayz Nite
The Thing That Should Not Let It Be
Everybody’s Got A Ticket To Ride Except For Me And My Lightning
Hey Dude
The image mashup: Worth1000.com runs Photoshop contests where a theme is proposed and photoshop artists from all over the world participate with their creations. The results are pure genius. Some are mashups, some retouch elements of actual pictures, etc… The results also display the power of these retouching artists, who can trick the eye without problem again an again.

The last contest I got a link from was “Art Advertisement”. I loved it! Here is a sample:

And here is the link: Worth1000.com | Art Ads 2

So this is it for today’s let’s discover new stuff on the web. Now I get back to some more relevant stuff (assignments and papers and stuff).

By the way, if you know any more interesting mashup, please leave me a comment. Wouldn’t it be fun to find a MBA mashup? (the best of X school with the best of Y school )