The concept of a website mashup is very recent and has been growing at a steady pace. So what is it? In simple terms, it's a way to combine website content from one or more websites together and the result is a new website that offers a new way of looking at the content and the correlations between it. The most popular mashup out there is to use Google maps service and combine it with other useful data to map something interesting. For example, MapSexOffender allows you to search for sex offenders using google maps based on street / city / state and area code in the US.
So what this site is doing, it's taking a public database of sex offenders and crossing it with google maps to provide people with a new website service.
Another interesting site is a weather website called WeatherBonk that allows you to select a city using google maps. Once the city is selected, the site will retrieve live web-cams from the internet that will give you a live shot of the cities different areas.
Google is one of the most popular ways to create a mashup website, but there are many other sites that allow you to use their content in many ways like Amazon for e-commerce, Flickr for images, and many more.
A website that I found that is a gateway to the most popular mashups on the web is ProgrammableWeb, it contains links to a lot of great mashup websites.
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