Remix Culture is a term created by Lawrence Lessing to describe a society which allows derivative works. "Derivative works" is defined as a second artist using major copyrighted aspects of an original primary work. This includes visual, audio, or written works of any kind.

There is an article in Wired magazine called "confessions of a cut and paste artist" which discusses the joy's of sampling and remixing the works of others in order to create something “completely new”. But for a more philosophic look at remix culture I suggest you read "the moral pretext for remixing" by Jonathan Boutelle.

There are currently legal limitations on the amount of remixing acceptable before a remixed work becomes questionable. Nevertheless, the manifesto of the remix culture clearly encourages the individual to remix and integrate multiple data sources without permission. The belief is that you should be able to take RSS feeds or an open API feed or scraped data from any XHTML website- and remix or combine it with any other sort of information you choose- without negotiation.

The reason I find this topic fascinating is that it affects the future of content on the internet. The whole "remix culture" concept calls into question the very purpose of the search engine algorithms. Google is quickly transforming these indexing algorithms into artificially intelligent censors. With the dawn of latent semantic indexing, Google will be able to compare original works with "remixed" works . . . and when the algorithm is powerful enough- it will be able to tell what percentage of your website content is an original idea and what percentage 'borrowed" or remixed.

It has been suggested by some that Google will give lower rankings for a higher percentage of remixed material? On the other hand, does anyone really have a truly original idea? Culture at large is sort of a "remix" of itself in many ways. What is Cosmopolitan today is “retro” tomorrow. Perhaps we are running out of good ideas, and remix is a part of a step in a new creative direction. Perhaps Web 2.0 is a platform for a new bandwidth of information-age communication and synthesis. (Yeah, now I am making words up . . . or am I remixing)?

What is my point?

Remix culture attempts to mix content and combine authorities without the need for classic citation or bibliography . . . in order to create something “new”. The challenge is that many people are creating derivative works that only loosely cites the original works. An example of this is the current explosion of private label content popping up all over the web in response to Google Secret Labs clamping down on machine generated Adsense websites. We predict that this sort of "high percentage" duplicate search engine content will ultimately be accounted for in a variety of different ways.  There will be a mathematical formula to detect how an original thinker represents himself/herself via text, audio, video, and latent semantic indexing.

A subject matter expert can say the same thing in a variety of different ways creating multiple associations and connections across multiple themes. An expert in any area can invariably create more value by combining ideas and giving birth to unique ones. A “remixer” is not always able to create relevant and valuable content as easily as a subject matter authority can.

If  I was going to remix content, I would want to appear as a subject matter expert- or I would want to become one. I would use Theme Zoom to select the theme of my content because subject matter experts have themes and patterns of words and synonyms they use to express their experiences and thoughts. Google is getting smarter and smarter at thinking like a subject matter expert.

Ironically many folks who get involved in remixing content accidentally become actual experts in the field they are mixing. This reminds me of the time I purchased one of those “robot” content softwares that taught me to slice and dice content and “spin” the words in order to get 200 versions of the same exact page. I remembered thinking to myself “geeze, with all the time I am spending figuring out how to spin garbage, I could already be a subject matter expert on this topic and give my visitors quality content”.

Theme Zoom is also designed to help you think like a subject matter expert while giving you proper suggested linking citations for websites that represent subject matter expertise on your given Niche, Subtheme, or Microniche. If you could think like both Google and a subject matter expert (SME) at the same time . . . you would be thinking like Theme Zoom™.

Various disciplines, themes and topics have cultural patterns of language, synonyms and link relationships throughout the search engines. Writing content that is designed to provide excellent and relevant information to the end user is the goal of the Google algorithm. Helping you to provide content that is the most relevant and useful to your visitors is the primary function of the Theme Zoom software.