Google Maps Mania — Mega Mash–Ups

Kevin Maney's column in yesterday's USA Today featured the craze surrounding Google Maps and the company's public release last month of a set of programming interfaces (called APIs) that let anyone take a set of data from one website and combine it with Google Maps to create something entirely new — a mash–up, to use the term popularized in the music world.

As usual, the whole thing is way beyond my capabilities but apparently not of those of most people of average intelligence: Maney wrote that every day a few new Google Maps mash–ups appear and more and more people are hopping aboard the bandwagon.

Yahoo Maps also released similar tools the day after Google but Yahoo's mash–ups don't seem to have caught fire with programmers, who find Google's code more user–friendly.

Maney wrote, "What you're seeing with these map mash–ups is the start of a whole new wave of the Web, in which data from different websites will be able to mix together to create all sorts of new offerings."

I'm reminded of the explosion of widgets that followed Apple's release of Tiger.

Maney pointed us to www.googlemapsmania.blogspot.com as "the best place to find links to most of the map mash-ups."

It's not clear to me whether the word "mash–up" will end up with or without the hyphen after the haze settles.

Maney uses the hyphenated version but the googlemapsmania site doesn't.

Me, I always opt for the simpler approach so I'm going bare from here on out.

A question: is this

a mashup?