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Drawing on sociolinguistic studies of language and place and on small stories insights and methods, I put forth rescripting as a social media-enabled practice of sharing that systematically exploits visual and/or verbal manipulations of the taleworld place of already circulated stories, so as to present the new tales as parody or satire of the originals. YouTube videos such as spoofs, memes, remixes, and mashups, form typical instances of rescripting, but other verbal activities should also be recognized as part of this practice, e.g. circulars of jokes about an incident on online blogs. Using as a case study a critical moment incident related to the Greek crisis that was repeatedly shared in social media, I examine rescripting as it occurs in the intersections between story making and social media affordances, arguing that it can productively open up the current sociolinguistic focus on resemiotizations of circulated activities. I show how changes in the place of the taleworld ultimately lead to changes in emplotment on the basis of the spatial semiotic repertoires associated with the new settings. Participation frameworks are decisively shaped by these changes, as commenters mainly engage with the current tale and telling, going along with the ostensibly 'fictional’ scenarios and engaging in active storytelling, that is, creating further plots on their basis. I discuss the implications of rescripting place for the study of sharing practices and vernacular participation as well as for the study of place as constitutive of narrative plots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mashup platforms are popular because they provide end-users with a powerful tool to query the Web. The majority of these platforms are designed using centralized architectures or loosely coupled distributed architectures. The lack of structure in these platforms makes searching for mashups an expensive task. In this paper we present two structured peer-to-peer architectures for mashup platforms, namely, MashChord and MashCAN. These platforms increase the efficiency of searching for mashups. In addition, our design makes sure a mashup is hosted at several peers which strengthens the reliability of the system. Moreover, execution offloading feature is added to our design to support the functionality of each peer in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on YouTube mashups and how we can understand them as a specific subgenre on YouTube. The Mashups are analysed as audiovisual recontextualizations that are given new meaning, e.g., via collaborative social communities or for individual promotional purposes. This is elaborated on throughout a discussion on Mashups as a mode of everyday bricolages, which are moreover discussed through a theoretical approach to Mashups as exponents of what has been called "Vernacular Creativity". The article also argues that the novelty of Mashups is not be found in its formal characteristic, but rather in its social and communicative abilities within the YouTube community. This leads to the article's overall argument that the main characteristic of the YouTube Mashup can be explained in terms of connectivity. It is argued that Mashups reveal a double articulation of connectivity; one that involves the social mechanisms of the Mashups, and another mode, which concerns the explicit embedding of structural connectivity that accentuates the medium-specific infrastructure of YouTube. This double articulation of connectivity is furthermore elaborated on by including Grusin and Bolter's concept of remediation. Methodologically, the article draws on empirical observations and examples of Mashups are included to demonstrate the article's main arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two of the icons of Web 2.0 applications are feed readers and mashup platforms. On one hand, feed readers provide end-users with updates of content of feeds they subscribe to. On the other hand, mashups are conceptually web services created by end-users and hosted by mashup platforms which empower end-users with a tool to query the web based on their personalised interests. In this paper, we combine the best of mashup readers and mashup platforms in order to design a novel Web 2.0 application called mashup reader. Mashup reader enables end-users to subscribe to their favourite mashups and obtain updates of the result of executing those mashups. In this paper, we introduce the design of mashup reader, provide ways to improve its efficiency, and evaluate its execution mechanism. Our experiments show that mashup reader is an efficient and scalable Web 2.0 platform which provides end-users with an effective web querying tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Mashups that combine data from numerous web sites into an integrated experience have rapidly become state-of-the-practice way to develop new compelling applications. However, their use has been somewhat restricted, since it is common that such applications can only be run inside the browser, not in a fashion where they would be directly associated with operating system concepts. Consequently their access to the resources of the hosting system has been limited, which forms a practical obstacle for numerous applications that could benefit from e.g. context information available in mobile context. The limitations are not something that is a fundamental restriction of web technologies, but only related to the existing implementations. In this paper, we show how we have implemented a mashup desktop, where applications that download data – and even complete web applications – from the web can be used in the same way as thumbnails are commonly used. Furthermore, instead of being static, the thumbnails can be alive in a fashion that has been made popular by newer desktop systems, such as Windows 7. The implementation is based on our earlier research on composing applications using JavaScript, the Qt framework, and the K Desktop Environment, whose innovative combination has been an enabler for this work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since the emergence of web 2.0, data started floating all over the web, through online and offline applications, and across all application domains. Web data (semi-structured data loaded through web browsers and applications communicating via internet protocols such as HTTP), in particular XML-based data, is being used for simple commercial information display (i.e., XHTML/HTML in commercial websites), instant messaging (e.g., XMPP for messaging in Whatsapp, Skype, Gtalk etc.), financial transactions (i.e., CDF3 in ecommerce), medical record processing and storage (e.g., HL7 for electronic medical records), social media (e.g., XHTML/HTML in facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc.), and others. This phenomenon rendered web data manipulation (i.e., monitoring, modifying, controlling, etc.) by IT (information technology) experts, computer technicians and engineers utterly difficult seeing its exponential growth rate in volume and diversity. Not to mention the dynamicity of the data which is continuously changing on the clock and its heterogeneity (e.g., HTML/HTML5, XML, XHTML, RDF, OWL, etc.). Consequently, the manipulation of web data and in particular XML data (since XML has become one of the most essential data types used in computer communications) has shifted from the hands of computer scientists and programmers towards public computer users in all application domains. This has brought a new criterion into the web data manipulation research field, web data manipulation by non-experts. In this paper, we study and analyze existent techniques for manipulating semi-structured web data, particularly XML data, from a non-expert point of view while relating it to traditional manipulation techniques defined in the literature (i.e., filtering, adaptation, data extraction, transformation, access control, encryption, etc.). Web data manipulation techniques by non-experts were categorized under 3 major titles: (i) XML-oriented visual languages dealing with XML data extraction and transformations, (ii) Mashups tackling mainly XML restructuring with value manipulations, and (iii) Dataflow visual programming languages targeting non-expert manipulations and providing means to visually manipulate scientific data. A full analysis was conducted which allowed existent approaches/techniques to be compared and evaluated providing an overview of the current requirements on this subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]