A Wired article entitled Man VS Machines examines the nature of newsreaders right now (Digg, Newsvine et al get a mention) and loosely categorises them into those that favour (AI) algorithms and those that leverage their user base to create semantic links between data. This is a false dichotomy, since both approaches should complement each other - how? Leave content classification & creation (data architectures) to the user, and the rest to the machines. The challenge lies in hybrid approaches.

From a technical perspective, the challenge equates to 'how to use the user base'.

The conflict the article alludes to is the same one evinced in Last FM Vs Pandora and can also be articulated as the AI VS AAI (Artificial Artificial Intelligence - a phrase coined by Rael from O'Reilly) debate. The supposed battle-ground is social software. I'd like to reinforce that the approaches are not mutually exclusive and that the future of social software rests in hybrid approaches, where human agents can consult non-human agents for search, data analysis (mining, visualization) and forecasting; all of which will require the breed of algorithms that are being thrown down the 'machine' end of the debate. Heavyweight AI (like highly refined NLP) is a waste of time at this stage though. It's an academic black hole.

Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.

- Bruce Sterling's southern drawl re-enforces the notion of a spime in his Internet of Things eTech keynote. It's an insightful, articulate rant on the language of emerging technology, how RFID will replace barcoding and the state of physical objects in the near future. If you didn't catch this talk a while back it's well worth the podcast.

If you'd like to help me build a Dymaxion house in second life - click the 'find' button down the bottom, click on the 'people' tab in the window that pops up and type in 'bucky'.

Getting your head around all the WS-* stuff is like trying to eat an elephant.

- Joe, commenting on Loud Thinking.

So David has pointed out the reality split between the industry led WS-* 'standards' pap and Restian principles. I deal with XML-RPC & Soap API's on a daily basis, and i find our Soap calls in particular over complex. The move from procedure call to state transfer is in sync with the natural architecture of the web. It forces you to think about your web application as an open data architecture from the offset (e.g. Delicious) and that can only be a good thing.

Did i say simple & open?

Well i've used the term mashupware a bunch of times, but Zimbra's online demo coins the phrase 'enterprise mashups'. The business model could mean a new age of SLA's between inter-dependent services, meaning folks like QOOP could ask for legal agreement from folks like Flickr, replete with uptime guarantees and service availability/quality guidelines.