The New York Times on Tuesday opened up its “Best Sellers API,” offering programmatic access to best-seller data (going back to 1930!) from the Times: The Times Best Sellers…

I’ve been banging on the RESTful services/XRX bandwagon for a while now, and the good folks at O’Reilly have kindly consented to let me get out the entire trap drum set for an O’Reilly Webinar entitled “Building RESTful Services with XQuery and XRX“.

I’m going to do something that’s just not done. There’s this unwritten rule in journalism that when you write, your goal in doing that writing is to be the authority, to ask the hard questions of those who are the experts or the ones with power, to then render these in a compelling story to you, gentle readers, while at the same time never extending beyond the bounds of the page - or in this case the screen - to, well you.

I have a terrible secret. I’m … I’m a … well, a tech nomad. On any given day of the week, you stand a good chance of finding me at Starbucks, plugging away on writing articles or hacking on code. You’ll find a lot of us here, tech nomads … I suspect that we single-handedly keep Starbucks afloat in these hard economic times, laptops out, heads down, plugged into our respective iPod soundtracks. In my case, baristas throughout the entire greater Victoria area know me by name, occasionally even giving me my drinks for free. They know a tech nomad when they see one.

Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group raised quite a few hackles in the IT press yesterday when she asserted that SOA is Dead. Anne has the chops to talk on the subject - beyond her respectable career as an SOA Analyst for the Burton Group, she was also a former CTO of Systinet, an SOA governance company that eventually was bought up by Hewlett Packard, and was one of the early architects of the WS-* architecture … so when she says “It’s dead, Jim”, people listen.

The potential benefits of being able to expose even a portion of data that businesses and organizations produce in a compatible manner would be huge - it would, indeed, be a major boost for businesses that are built on or around the Internet as well as provide the framework to turn much of the economy into a Mashup Economy.

The problem, of course, is standardization.

In case you need to catch up, Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group declared that “SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession!”.

I’m not against finding a new name for this thing that we have been until-recently-referring-to-as-SOA but I still am looking for a reason why….

I spent about an hour yesterday morning on the phone (at Canada’s rather obscene cell phone rates) speaking with an “editor” for Continental Who’s Who. The pitch is pretty typical (and I had an idea what was going on, so I decided to follow through with it) - you get an email congratulating you on being selected for inclusion in the Who’s Who directory of “famous people”, please send in the email in order to confirm your selection.

…the whole world smiles with you. No it’s not a typo, the acronym for the W3C’s Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is pronounced “smile”, and the SMIL Animation module sure makes me smile; even more so given the fact that I’ve seen it mentioned, outside of the usual multi-media circles, three times last year and once already this year…

For the most part, new EXQuery functions would simply represent wrappers around existing XQuery extension functionality in order to provide a consistent interface between databases. It would also set a bar that determines the minimal expectation of such databases and data systems and provides a way for new entrants into the field to be able to XQuery scripts without having to refactor code.