NEW YORK. Nearly a year after first announcing Mashup Hub, IBM is still keen on its online mashup application. In a standing room only session at AjaxWorld in NYC IBM staffer Dan Gisolfi preached the wisdom of IBM's mashup ways to the Ajax crowd.

IBM staffers also talked about the OpenAjax widget specifications which will more easily enable widget development that will run across a wide variety of platforms.

Gisolfi was joined at the podium with David Boloker, CTO of Emerging Technology at IBM. Boloker is Ajax 'royalty' being one of the cofounders of the OpenAjax Alliance.

"Data is the center of the mashup ecosystem, everything builds from there," Gisolfi said." Discovering assets and then making use of them and wiring them together to create a new app that you can share."

The focus of the IBM presentation was supposed to be about the mashup ecosystem and how an enterprise can leverage it. Unfortunately the presenters spent way too much of their time trying to figure out how to get network access to show their mashups. I guess they probably should have spent more time working on 'local' hosted mashups (which is what they tried to do at one point).

With only five minutes left in the scheduled presentation, they finally figured out how to get a live connection (NOTE: I'm in the same session right now and I've got a connection - which is how I'm blogging this entry).

So the lesson here? DON'T ever rely on having a network connection (even if one exists) when you're trying to show mashups at a conference - which is a paradox in some ways since mashups rely on online data.