Marc Canter has an interesting post at AlwaysOn about Breaking the Web Wide Open. When I released Book Burro, I was surprised at the response from Amazon. This little app completely broke open Amazon's store (in addition to other book stores), treating book stores as little more than data providers. Before releasing it, I wrote a quick note to the Amazon Web Services team giving them a chance to give me a cease and desist before the project launched. They responded by listing it on their AWS blog as a cool project. From talking with Jeff Barr (as well as the director of AWS in Japan), I get the feeling that Amazon understands the benefit of being open.
The article has a great overview on many topics ranging from identity, pinging, tagging, open media, attention, microcontent, effectively a great overview of what "Web 2.0" is all about.
One thing that he doesn't mention is Greasemonkey. I think that Greasemonkey can help force openness. If a site isn't open, we can open it up. Since userscripts run on the client, there aren't pesky legal issues as the end users is modifying their data, not an intermediary. Userscripts.org is already hosting over 1000 scripts that fix and open the web.
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