Client-work aside, I've launched two pet projects onto the web recently.

Oh-Ate.com is a real simple site launched in collaboration with Rich. It's an aggregator of the blogs, press releases, Flickr photos, and YouTube videos from the various presidential campaigns. It was inspired by a request from Zephyr, who wondered, is it really necessary to go to fourty-five different URLs to find out what all fifteen candidates are saying at any given moment? It also lead to some fun work with Micah and Josh on TechPresident.com, and Oh-Ate Version 2.0 is currently under construction in collaboration with Washingtonian.com's hardcore-looking webteam.

"NCLB?" was another quicky, built as an entry to The Sunlight Foundation's Mashup Congress Contest. This was a another collaboration, this time with Leah Nelson, a sometime journalist and longtime friend. To be honest, our hope was to find an obvious discrepancy between statewide educational performance and NCLB funding of each state, but in the end nothing so clearly unjust emerged. Instead, it's a complicated soup of data, and wound up creating more questions than it answered. Which is actually great, as it potentially opens the door to a more thorough and complex version in the future.

Both of these mash-up and consolidate data from around the web, but — more importantly — they begin to mash up the roles of "programmer" and "journalist" into something new and different. Adrian Holovaty, the Washington Post's lead developer, often speaks smart about this; how web-technology and database-wizardry will be as important tools for twenty-first-century journalism as photography and writing have been in the past.

This suggests one way of looking at the recent generation of web technology I haven't heard before; that the web is becoming a medium in and of itself. Up until recently, it's been conceived of only as a container for other media; words, photography, video, animations, etc. (There's the cliché that a bad website tries to be a television commercial or brochure or movie instead of being, you know, a web site.) But the new tools, the mashups et al, are a medium in and of themselves, one of course only in its infancy.

So: How will it transcend just being simple tools and clever gimmicks? In the coming decades, who will be the Annie Liebowitz of web-applications, the Seymour Hersh of mash-ups, the Ken Burns of data-analysis? What would that even look like?