In praise of stupidity
I have been listening to IT Conversations for a while now (before iTunes "invented" podcasting in the public eye). Doug Kaye corrals a great group of producers and volunteers to capture and present some of the best tech thinkers at conferences and in interviews.
A recent program really stirred me up. Adam Bosworth - Database Requirements in the Age of Scalable Services, presented at the recent MySQL Users Conference, discusses the problems of scale and complexity, particular in the context of finding and presenting data. He compares the complicated WS-* standards to RSS/ATOM. His ultimate conclusion is that RSS/ATOM may be a fundamental building block in helping applications scale on the internet, since it operates at an item level, letting applications decide how to relate those. Excellent stuff and very inspiring.
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