18 Apr 2002
Thu, 18 Apr 2002
Disintermediating Publishing
Let me start off by saying that Chris Wenham is smart. Very smart.
I'm not sure if that's a revelation to anyone, whether his technique has been written about before, or whether his technique is unique, but it is compelling for a number of reasons. What technique, you ask? Read on.
First, a brief description. Chris has a system where an external site that links into his site gets a link on the page that is linked to - automagically. Phew! It's tough to comprehend all those links. Read it again and a third time if it hasn't sunk in yet. You can see this in the screenshot below. I linked to disenchanted.com from this weblog. Then, disenchanted.com auto-generated the link back to me and they even added a little commentary onto my link.
The disintermediation occurs because disenchanted and I are now competing with established publications by working in concert. I had no distribution channel to speak of when I started this weblog. But doors have opened magically because I provided a few pieces of content that someone wanted to read. Disenchanted provides a very real incentive to link to their site which changes the economics of information. Readers of both sites benefit because they get a broader array of ideas and information than they would have gotten from either site individually. Disenchanted benefits by the referrals they get from my link, I benefit by the referrals I get from disenchanted; it's a win-win for everyone. But wait, it gets better.
Disenchanted has gone so far as to tie their auto link generating system into their RSS feed. Now, anyone that's subscribed to disenchanted's RSS feed, gets a link to my article. Because my RSS feed is tied into my email. I receive an email with the link like this:
 Disenchanted's Recent Referers, 4/18/2002; 2:07:01 PM. | ||
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Disenchanted could have subscribers through the normal RSS feed channels such as Userland Radio and Eazel's Nautilus but they could also be publishing the RSS feed via email as I've demonstrated here. The sheer reach and implications of such a system are staggering. | ||
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Posted at: 16:09 | permalink
Barbarians at the gate, or the meek shall inherit the data
Edd Dumbill: "The frenzy over Google's new SOAP API is just plain silly." 
[Scripting News]
Call me crazy, but am I the only person out here that thinks that attitudes like this can go the way of the dinosaur? I think Ed Dumbill finally realized that Google gave away the keys to the safe and now mere mortals have access to the safe and that means that the I can connect these people to that data in 1 line of shell script crowd is nervous. It's like the TV show Name That Tune.
What happens if it doesn't cost six figures in salary cost to hook my application to your data across the internet in a hurry? Six figures will go elsewhere to solve bigger and better problems. Besides, what this is really about is that people who know what users want to do with business data can connect them to that data via rich user interfaces, without hiring an Oracle DBA! Perhaps Edd should read this and realize that there's huge value in simplicity and ubiquity, even if that value is opaque to him.
Finally, my original vbscript post an hour after google released their API was less than 100 characters. Ed Dumbill's ill-disguised shell script was 350 characters. If we're going to play the Name That Tune game, I'll bet you can do that mail app in about as much VB, despite the fact that you're not a VB programmer!
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the essence of what we're talking about here. Ed Dumbill wants you to get your linux box and write some pretty hideous shell script. The spirit of SOAP says, use whatever platform you've got, with whatever language you've got, and be done with it. That's empowerment. And that's why some digerati are running scared.
Posted at: 13:09 | permalink
Broken link to java google soap api source fixed
Special thanks go out to John Yester for apprising me of the fact that the link to my java google soap api source zip was broken. It's not broken any more. See here.
Posted at: 11:05 | permalink
