The web is about to explode again. There is some serious development going on with SOAP and the derivative XML-RPC. Remote web-based algorithms as well as data sources. They've tried this kind of thing before with various distributed computing infrastructures and web objects schemes. These have always been prohibitively difficult to use.  This is only the latest incarnation - but this time it's ridiculously simple, and it's being built into everything. XML is how we get our data fed to us these days - whether you're aware of it or not. It's the language of information feeds of all types between organizations and data centers. It uses the same web servers that show you pages like this, except it is used more for delivering data rather than displaying it. Any kind of data. It's how your local sales droid knows how many items of type 'x' he has in the Virginia warehouse.  The RPC part is 'Remote Procedure Call'. It carries with it the ability to do pretty much anything with a chunk of pretty much any kind of data and give you back some form of result. That's how Yahoo gets stock quotes and news. It allows for remotely accessed intellectual property, and works exactly the same on any computing platform. 

That's the interesting part. It's even more portable than Java. If you can do something cool with a chunk of data, or generate a chunk of data, you can provide access to it (by selling it or giving it away - as the case may be). And you never have to divulge how you did it. The customer's software is always the latest version because the customer doesn't have the software. You do.

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Today I was looking at the weblog competition. The number one open source weblog publishing system. I was frankly amazed at how primitive it is. It has a bit more flexibility just because it uses a database for storage, but in terms of features out-of-the-box, it's practically a draw. It has categories and registration. I have HTML editing and uploads. I think my package actually looks better, but that's personal opinion. In any event it doesn't look significantly worse. They've got 40,000 downloads, I've got 30. No, not 30,000. 30. Oh well. See what happens when you're number one?