Mashups

During Extreme blue internship 2007 at IBM's pune office , I heard a lot about the Mashup and related stuff. so I tried to find out what Mashup is , and tried to create mashups.
First of all a mashup is basically a web application that gathers data from various sources , in the various formats ( map, image, text etc) , manipulates this gathered data and presents to the user in desired form. I tried to create mashup using some very smart tools available on the web like Yahoo Pipes.
Also the important resource for mashup developers is ProgrammableWeb which contains a whole lot of API's which we can use freely. some other mashup development tools are IBM QEDWiki and Microsoft's popfly. Belive me Mashup are the cool ways to develop smart applications without coding a single line. If you know about portals , you will ask what is the difference between both..well basically the difference is that inter portal communication is too difficult also the portals were not designed with ajax interaction model in mind , but JSR 286 looks to solve these problems so portal interaction will also be easier now :-) .