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On this day in 1878, Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle" and passionate crusader for social reform, was born. This is from his obituary in the New York Times:

"The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died the word 'Calais' would be found written on her heart. I don't know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there--'Social Justice.' For that is what I have believed in and fought for."
Wherever Mr. Sinclair looked he saw corruption triumphant and virtue a dauntless but battered cause. "The vision of life that had come to me must be made known to the world, in order that men and women might be won from their stupid and wasteful ways of life," he thought. "Long ago my friend Mike Gold wrote me a letter, scolding me severely for what he called my 'Jesus complex'; I answered that the world needs a Jesus more than it needs anything else."

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0920.html

Forbes online discribes a hot business opportunity:


The Mashup Economy

Where (Google is) putting some of brainy Google's best minds, are the smallest things of all: virtual golf games, flight simulators and hotties in a security box.

Such Web candies are three among thousands of examples of "mashups," which blend software from multiple sources and recombine them on the fly to create novel entertainments and services. They will, (Google) figures, transform the business world, and help put Google everywhere... Yahoo! and Microsoft are moving the same way, and companies as diverse as Dell, Chevron and Marriott International are picking up on the trend.

The three search giants, plus Amazon , eBay and others, are all giving away code, offering up computing resources and begging hackers to build with them. Mashups are also moving fast into the corporate world thanks to alliances between the likes of Google and Salesforce.com. In the next year or two, executives say, there will be thousands more software products to chose from, built from mashups.

"We don't have the resources to build all these," says (Google’s) Schmidt. "We are critically dependent upon the creation of the developer community." The bigger he can make it, he says, the better off and unassailable he makes Google. It is, he says, "the No. 1 goal ... it creates so much good will, so much leverage, so much user traffic, so much benefit."

So much money. Most mashups cash in with Google's advertising engine on their sites, splitting the take with Google. If you have just one page, you don't make much, but some have many more. (Yahoo! has a similar service, called publisher's network, which is less broadly used.) Google also wants to grow the Internet as much as possible--the more interesting things there are, the more people will need Google to find them. And the better it understands what users are doing with a mashup--something that only the owners of the original data see best--the better its search results.

The term "mashup" comes from music, when two or more songs are mixed together to build a new sound. In software, they arise when someone develops a company's online maps, calendars, photos, search engines and other products, usually through relatively small amounts of code that is posted on the Internet. These outside developers take the application to new uses, usually through combining the data of several sites.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/09/17/mashup-search-google-tech-cz_qh_0918google.html?partner=smallbusiness_newsletter