Open APIs

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2007062719 The article Six Basic Truths About Free APIs has already received comments from George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Its important to read these posts carefully as we move into a more 'mashup'-oriented way of handling interoperability. One of the concerns of using decentralized, commercial third-party services is that they can change pricing model, ownership, or privacy policy without much warning. In such an environment, people in education are rightly concerned. However, a practical solution we (as in, institutions) could take is to offer a free personal archiving service for staff and students - even if MySpace suddenly decides to start charging you money, you can get your scraped pages out of the archive and start the migration process. In a more ideal world everything would offer full-content feeds so personal archiving would be quite trivial, but not all services, even those badged "Web 2.0" offer such capabilities. [From: Scott Wilson : Weblog, September 11, 2007] 275939...
Original article from http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/edurss02.cgi?rd=275939