IBM's developerWorks has an introductory article on mashups called "Mashups: the new breed of Web app". I'm trying to find a few free moments to read it, but here's the contents:
- introduction
- genres
- mapping
- video and photps
- search and shopping
- news
- related technologies
- architecture
- ajax
- SOAP and REST
- screen scraping
- semantic web and RDF
- RSS and Atom
- technical challanges
- data integration challenges: semantic meaning and data quality
- component challenges
- social challenges
- summary
A few notes:
- Weird that "business challenges" doesn't appear there.
- The failure of RDF (in either XML or N3 form) is a huge failure of the semantic web community to push their technology into a realm where it would be really quite useful (rather than seeing mashup providers creating custom ad-hoc XML formats)
- One goal of the BlogMatrix Platform is to make all the data that goes into creating your website "mashup" ready. Strangely, RDF may be the mechanism for this :-)