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Shake it up, baby! Web services and the user-centric digital content remix
Think "on demand" means pulling down last night's Letterman monologue at your leisure, or "RSS-ing" the NYTimes.com theater reviews into MyYahoo!? Think again.
eContent Magazine (cover story)
Steve Smith
Squads of military personnel walk into a Baghdad crossroads. From their cell phones, PDAs, or laptops, they plug into fresh reports on this location from the last passing squad, enemy sightings, or even instructions for clearing their weapons of sand live, contextually relevant, constantly updated data pouring into any device from a simpleXML "Warrior Knowledge" base. Now that's on-demand.
In markedly less bullet-strewn university classrooms, O'Reilly Media's Safari U lets instructors craft online syllabi without requiring studentsto buy a single book. "Educators have access to a whole library, [and]can mix and match content and create their own custom print books"to form a vast array of book chapters and articles, according to C.J.Rayhill, CTO. Students subscribe to the syllabus, which links only to the information they need, without weighty, expensive tomes of chapters they never use. Instructors and students can even annotate the virtual syllabus with notes and commentary. Plug and play? This is plug, play, and remix.
Welcome to an on-demand nation, an emerging Web where users don'tjust demand content, they also define its value in unanticipated ways."Think about your Web site as an application," says Kelly Abbott, technology director of Red Door Interactive, which manages publishers' "presence"on the Web. "Develop Web Services," he advises. Unleash that data from traditional site experiences. Let live information flow among partners, get pulled, parsed, re-mixed, and pushed to a range of devices and even into other applications.
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