A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:
On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?
Data Mining: Greg on MashupsThere is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.
Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups
But I think this misses a larger point.
Big companies are not the only entities who produce useful information. All sorts of sole-proprietors produce information free to be referenced, for instance my proto suprglu remix on weight lifting. These people, for the most part, are looking for exposure and are very unlikely to withdraw their data just because you are providing them more of what they are already looking for.
From this perspective, the real issue in mash-ups is having easy, low-cost ways for social entrepreneurs to create them. So, basically there is an infrastructure business model to be had here. FeedDigest is demonstrating it, SixApart is moving there, and SuprGlu, so far, seems to be the most streamlined example.
You linked to sixapart.org which is just an ad-page. sixapart.com is better..