Ray Ozzie: 'the platform of the Internet really is the data'
ACM Queue has published an interview with Microsoft's CTO Ray Ozzie. Worth a read.
"WK Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, coined the phrase “the architecture of participation,” meaning a lot of amateur and casual programmers piling on and building interesting things off the snippets of codes and applications that are out there. What are the open APIs and standards that a developer should keep track of in collaborative applications? Do you have any tips on how to craft an API amenable to this kind of open participation, to put things out there that can get picked up and reused?
RO Dan Bricklin also has a great phrase, “cornucopia of the commons,” that refers to the same thing—about how the commons becomes more valuable than the different pieces that are contributed. I think it’s a very important concept and spans far beyond collaborative software. It’s really what is defining this next wave of the Internet.
I believe that the platform of the Internet really is the data, and by putting data out there that is re-mixable into different types of applications, we can get interesting, unanticipated results. The most fundamental standards around that start with XML, but it really revolves around what some people call microformats, small formats that are easily understood and generated by a broad variety of applications, such as iCal, hCal, and vCard, and then encapsulating them in RSS.
RSS is an extremely important standard. It’s the HTML of the next generation of the Web, or some people might refer to it as the Unix pipe of the Internet. It’s a way of channeling data from one application to another in very interesting and robust fashion. Again, I think it’s important as a technique far beyond just collaborative software."
Via Microsoft Watch