The Ontario College of Teachers says teachers should avoid connecting with their students on Facebook or Twitter.

They are also told to avoid contacting them on LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and MySpace.

It’s a great idea to offer guidelines for how teachers communicate with vulnerable pre-College/University students; it’s too bad that the College revealed little other than its own ignorance in the way it wrote them. In a sense, that’s our fault in IT, because we call a whole bunch of unrelated things “social media”, so we can hardly expect teacher-bureaucrats to distinguish between broadcasting publicly over Twitter and exchanging secrets with a select group of friends over Facebook.

Not where you are, but what you’re doing

So, let’s forget about red herrings like online vs. offline, social media, etc., and instead, propose two simple questions a teacher has to answer:

1. Is it all taking place in the public view (can the student’s parents, my colleagues, my principal, etc. follow the exchange)?

2. Is it related to my role as a teacher (am I using this information to help teach, or do I have non-professional motives)?

If the answer to both these questions is “yes”, then the communication is probably appropriate, whether it’s through the spoken word, paper, Twitter, Facebook, or any channel.

Good and bad communication

Here are some examples of how the questions play out:

• It is OK, and often desirable, for a student to read public school-related information posted by a teacher, whether it’s on a bulletin board in the hallway, a Twitter feed, a blog, or a posting in a Facebook group. “Public” means that the parents and principal can read it too. It’s a good way for a teacher to communicate with the students (deadlines, assignments, study hints, etc.) and encourage discussion.

• It is usually OK for a teacher to read public information posted by a student, whether it’s a letter to the editor in a newspaper, a Twitter feed, or a posting in a Facebook group. The key is whether the information is related to the teacher’s role — for example, reading a feed of public political. literary or math tweets from a student is being a good teacher; scouring tweets (or any other public information, such as Google Streetview or the phone book) for personal information is stalking.

• It is probably not OK for a teacher to open private communication channels with a student, where the communication can’t be seen by other teachers, parents, etc. This would include passing private notes in the student’s locker, exchanging email (unless the parent or another teacher is CC’d on it), becoming Facebook friends, chatting privately using Jabber or MSN, or exchanging SMS text messages. This is a bad idea even if the communication is meant to be strictly professional, because it leaves students open to manipulation, and teachers open to accusation.

Sound reasonable? It’s not the platform (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) but the activity that matters. As long as you keep everything out in plain view, talking and exchanging information is a good thing, online or otherwise.

Does this mean that Google is about to roll out full Google Voice support for Canada, or just that they forgot to plug a hole in the code that that’s supposed to prevent non-US accounts from using the service?

Google Voice on my Android phone would be fantastic, because I could make unlimited North American phone calls on (say) a 6 GB, $30/month data plan instead of paying the world’s highest cell phone bills for (limited) voice and long distance. I’m sure Rogers and other mobile carriers won’t be happy about that, but I hope their lobbyists can’t stop it.

Java is dead.

A lot of developers have thought they were too hip for Java, but I still liked it. I implemented SAX in Java first of all, and have developed software in Java and encouraged my enterprise customers to use it for many years, sometimes in 9-figure projects at Fortune-500 companies — it’s a great, mature platform, with a lot of tools for managing large projects and development teams, and it has unit-testing and IDE support that is second to none.

But now, Oracle (which recently bought Sun) has decided to sue Google for using Java in Android, even though (a) Sun long ago open sourced Java, and (b) Google built its own VM anyway. I very much hope that Oracle will suffer the same humiliating, crushing, well-deserved defeat that the SCO group suffered when it went after Linux with its own bogus law suits, but it will take years for that to happen. The Android and Blackberry mobile operating systems will be fine, and Java (of a sort) will live on there (though I still recommend web apps instead of phone apps), but the days of Java and Eclipse in the enterprise are finished.

In the meantime, there are lots of open alternatives to Java, and the litigation risks of using Java have suddenly become far too high. In my consulting work, I’ll reluctantly have to advise customers not to use Java for any new projects, and to consider migrating older projects to a different platform. If you’re a big company or government, you just can’t afford the risk that Oracle will come after you, too.

I’m sorry the end was so sudden and messy, but still, it was a great 15 years. Thanks to James Gosling and all the other people in the Java community for the memories and opportunities.

So what happened last week?  Did Google backtrack after getting caught trying to be evil about net neutrality and the mobile internet, or were they a victim of a misunderstanding (gleefully amplified by blood-thirsty Apple and RIM supporters)?

Net neutrality is a crucial issue for those of us who care about open information.  We believe that the Internet is a public thoroughfare, where every information provider has the same access.  Competing web sites shouldn’t have their traffic slowed down because Google or Microsoft paid more money to Verizon, Rogers, or Bell, any more than you should have to pull to the side of the road to let someone in a more expensive car pass you.

Carriers in search of a business plan

For obvious reasons, the Internet providers don’t see it that way. They’ve ended up stuck in the rut of commodity service, with the inevitable race to the bottom for price, and are desperate to find some new revenue.  The mobile Internet providers are a little better off because they can at least lock customers into three-year contracts by giving them subsidized smartphones, but it’s still clear that someone like Verizon would be thrilled be able to take a big bag of money from Google in exchange for letting Google sites load a little faster than anyone else’s.

It turns out, though, that that’s not what Google was trying to do.

Neutral in what sense?

The Google-Verizon kerfuffle draws attention to a different, and trickier part of the debate.  What if, instead of discriminating by provider (Google vs Facebook), carriers discriminated by traffic type? In other words, what if streaming audio and video got priority handling to avoid jerky playback, while e-mail was delayed an extra 2-4 seconds? All streaming video would get the same treatment, whether it comes from YouTube or a student’s dorm-room start-up, and all e-mail would get the same treatment, whether it’s from IBM or a LOL cats fan list.

According to Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, this is what Verizon and Google were talking about all along: not favouring one provider over another, but favouring one content type over another.

Is it still evil?

I expect that many people who support net neutrality for providers won’t feel so strongly about net neutrality for content types, because it doesn’t have the same appearance of unfairness.

Going back to the thoroughfare analogy, we have sidewalks where only pedestrians are allowed, paths where only cyclists are allowed, crossings that pedestrians aren’t allowed to use, and superhighways where only motor vehicles are allowed. Buses and carpoolers are sometimes allowed to use a faster lane, trucks are sometimes required to stay in the slower lanes, and so on.  Why can’t we have different lanes for different kinds of network traffic, too?

Net neutrality makes sense for content types, too

There are, however, four compelling arguments in favour of net neutrality by content type as well as provider:

1. Pandora’s Box — it seems straight-forward enough to give streaming video priority over email, but how far might carriers take it? Will carriers throttle IM during the next G8 summit to make it harder for protesters to organize? Will government regulators prefer content types that are more popular among the old than the young?
2. Business/content-type alignment — as the owner of the world’s top video site, Google has a strong interest in making video on the mobile web faster, even if it means that its competitors’ videos are faster too. This kind of thing could turn evil fast — imagine Adobe and Apple in a bidding war to determine whether Flash should be delivered faster or slower than other content types, or the recording industry lobbying to throttle bittorrent so much that it becomes useless.
3. Innovation — the Internet already existed when HTML and HTTP arrived on the scene 20 years ago. If the net hadn’t been neutral then, perhaps priority would have gone to important existing protocols like telnet and FTP, and HTTP (and HTML) might have been slow enough to turn off early adopters. We don’t know what The Next Big Thing will be, but we do know that regulators respond slowly to change. Why shut the door on innovation?
4. Routing around censorship — seriously, how long will it take a few enterprising developers to realize that they can build an “accelerated download” app that allows other traffic to masquerade as video (or whatever has top priority). Seconds? Less? You can make anything look like anything else on the Internet, and everyone thinks that his/her traffic is most important.

It’s OK to be wrong sometimes

Google is a company that embraces failure, which, perhaps, is why it has so many successes: Google puts products out early, lets us play with them, then feeds the ones that succeed (e.g. Gmail) and kills the ones that don’t (e.g. Wave).

Perhaps Google is willing to try the same thing with ideas — they’re not necessarily evil for suggesting dropping net neutrality for content types, but they are wrong. Let’s treat the whole thing as a failed project and move on, concentrating on making the net (mobile or desktop) faster for all providers, and all content types.

Why the disparity? Calgary is an oil city. When the recession hit and resource prices tanked, Calgary was the centre of a huge housing bubble because of high oil prices, and Vancouver was in a major real-estate bubble of its own because of the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, so both had further to fall — they’re just adjusting back to realistic market prices.

Toronto is the financial centre of Canada, and we all know what happened to the finance industry, but it has a very wide employment base outside of finance, and vibrant immigrant community, and a lot of pent-up housing demand, so I’m not surprised to see a more moderate fall there.

Ottawa is the capital, so it has government jobs as a cushion, but it’s also one of Canada’s leading tech centres. While big companies like Nortel and Corel are in terminal decline, small tech companies around Ottawa are doing very well. I live here, and as far as I can tell, for-sale signs on lawns still don’t stay up too long.

Montreal. Montreal? It was the awkward poor sibling of big Canadian cities for a couple decades after the whole separatism thing started (and people and head offices fled to Ottawa and Toronto), but it’s been coming back recently — the streets aren’t as dirty, the heroin addicts are panhandling more politely, and after all, it’s still Montreal. Just like Manhattan in the 1970s at its dirtiest and most dysfunctional was still more fun than any other U.S. city, Montreal will always be the coolest Canadian city to visit. The suburban (and English-speaking) west end of the island is a huge centre for pharmaceutical companies, and perhaps they’re doing well in the recession (I haven’t checked).

Not much to say about Halifax, which is a much smaller city than the others, except that it’s a nice place, and I’m glad to see they’re doing well.

Perhaps when I find February or March figures, the news will be worse; then again, as a measurement tool, CHPI can make things look a lot worse than RSPI, so it’s just as likely that things are better than these number suggest.

Basically, we’ve slipped back to between 2004 and 2007, depending on which indicator you look at (a little further, probably, if I included stock market indices). That’s not great (and our population is a bit larger), but ask yourself this: how did you feel in 2004? Were you as worried as you are now? Did it feel like a depression then?

I know things aren’t great — especially for people who’ve been laid off and/or lost their retirement savings or homes — but I think the (mainly left-wing) pundits (journalists, bloggers, and politicians) who keep screaming words like “depression” are just exploiting fear to try to get more attention for themselves, just like the (mainly right-wing) pundits did with anti-terrorism fears after 2001-09-11.

It’s a vicious circle, because they have to keep upping the ante to stand out from the others, until we’re all convinced we’ll be standing in soup lines tomorrow (assuming anyone can afford to supply us with soup).

Truscott’s initial wrongful conviction took place 40 years ago, but if anything, he’s better known now than any time before. Three men with more recentky-overturned convictions — Robert Baltovich, Bill Mullins-Johnson, and James Driskell — are also getting on-going press coverage, TV documentaries, etc.

I had never thought anything unusual about this phenomenon, until the Mullins-Johnson article was suddenly deleted from Wikipedia, with no debate — the Wikipedia editor had assumed that a wrongful conviction was so obviously unnotable that no discussion was required, but when I objected, he did restore the article and start a proper RFD debate.

When Wikipedia has articles about minor, imaginary videogame characters, it seemed unimaginable to me at first that editors would try to delete an article about a real, famous person, but so far, there seems little support for keeping the article. Thinking about it, I suddenly realized that the wrongfully-convicted aren’t famous in the U.S. Sure, I could Google around and find a few names, but in the U.S., serving 10 years for a murder you didn’t commit does not automatically make you a household name — in fact, it might not even result in a national news story.

Perhaps there’s a strong feeling of discomfort around the issue in a country that still executes so many of its citizens. Or perhaps, because the wrongly-convicted often have prior criminal records, Americans don’t feel that their convictions were such a serious injustice. Many U.S. jurisdictions (all?) have very small limits on the compensation you can receive for a wrongful conviction, while in Canada, someone who has been in jail for years could receive well over $1M — a big news story in itself.

I have a conflict of interest with the RFD for the Bill Mullins-Johnson article because I was the original author (though many others have since contributed), but if the article is going to be deleted, I’d hate it to be simply from lack of debate. So, Wikipedia users, whether you agree or disagree with me, please visit the RFD page and have your say.

Facebook and other US sites have no problem sending SMS messages to my Canadian cell phone, but Twitter hasn’t had as much luck — maybe they’ve been looking for ways to avoid paying bulk SMS charges. However, they recently announced that customers of Bell Mobility (one of Canada’s big two wireless providers) can now send and receive tweets again, with “no limits and no added fees (beyond your normal texting plan).”

Not so, says Bell. According to this story, Bell Mobility is treating Twitter as a “premium service”, and will charge CAD 0.15 for every tweet sent or received, no matter what text plan you have.

That’s actually worse than the status quo. On my Canadian Rogers cell phone, I can’t receive tweets right now, but I don’t pay anything extra to send them with my current text plan.

I guess I’ll stick with Facebook status updates instead. They work fine with Canadian phones, and Rogers hasn’t (yet) decided that they’re a premium service.

In my home province, Ontario, it’s now illegal to smoke in a car with a child in it [story]. Another sign of a growing nanny state?

No. A nanny state passes laws to protect people from themselves — “wear a helmet”, “don’t eat trans-fats”, “don’t smoke pot”.

A government passes laws to protect its citizens from each-other — “don’t steal”, “don’t drive drunk”, “don’t attack people with a hockey stick”, or even “don’t do noisy construction work at 3:00 am in a residential area”.

If you’re a hockey player, I support your right to swing your stick, but that right does not extend all the way to my face. If you’re a smoker, I support your right to smoke (tobacco or otherwise), but that right does not extend all the way to my lungs, or to your child’s. There’s nothing nannyish about that.

We’ve had a glimpse of what that future dystopia might look like here in Ottawa, as our public transit strike has just finished its first month. We’ve had only about 20% more cars on the road, but combined with very cold weather and heavy snow (including blizzards), things have gotten bad. One-way commutes that used to take 45 minutes now sometimes take two and a half hours, and the downtown core completely gridlocks: even as new drivers arrive, the ones came 30 minutes ago are still circling trying to find somewhere to park.

How can any big city survive a traffic nightmare like this? Here are some of the workarounds people have come up with:

• Missing work altogether. I know one doctor who had a four-hour shift scheduled at her suburban hospital before Christmas on the morning of a very heavy snowfall. She called and found out that even if she could make it in, there was an hour-and-a-half line-up to get into the parking lot (even for doctors), so she finally just gave up.

• Time-shifting. Not every job actually requires you to be in from 9-5. People are heading to work a couple of hours early or late and missing the worst of the gridlock. By 7:00 pm, traffic is almost back to normal again, at least in the city core.

• Telecommuting. People are working from home more often than usual, or just as often, working from the nearest coffee shop. They look at the weather forecast, and if it’s bad and their jobs permit, they just stay home.

• Human propulsion. People who live within easy walking distance (5 km/3 miles) of work or school are just walking — its faster, and burns off some of the Starbucks calories. Walking’s not pleasant on days when the windchill drops to -25 degC or worse, but it beats gridlock and fighting for a scarce parking spot. Cycling’s not an option in this weather except for the very brave, but people are also cross-country skiing or skating to work when they can.

• Ride sharing. While it doesn’t help you get to work any faster individually (though it helps in the aggregate), ride sharing is very useful if you have no car, or if it’s difficult to find parking places where you’re heading. Lots of people are car-pooling with co-workers, using ride-sharing web sites, or even just standing by the side of the road holding signs saying where they want to go.

• Private shuttles. The universities set up private shuttles to help at least some students get in for the Christmas exams, and fortunately, the transit union backed down from its threat to block them with picket lines. Some high schools are also offering limited private bus service (Ottawa urban high school and middle school students use public transit, not yellow school buses).

• Fewer parking restrictions. Parking spots in the city core that normally have a 1-, 2-, or 3-hour time limit are now unrestricted, so that commuters can use them (the normal time limit is meant to guarantee that they’re left free for shoppers, etc., so businesses might not be thrilled). People have misinterpreted that and parked in no-parking/no-stopping zones or even in front of hydrants, and have been furious when they’ve been ticketed.

• Helping the vulnerable. Our ParaTranspo service is still operating, and there’s talk about extending it to seniors (so that they’re not shut in). The city is also talking about taxi vouchers for low-income earners whose jobs are at risk.

So over all, a city can cope, even with a crisis like this. Most people I’ve talked to don’t like the strike, but also admit that we’re getting used to living without public transit.

I think we’re missing some real opportunities, though. For example, why not designate one or two lanes on the major highways as carpool-only lanes (minimum 3 occupants)? That way, there would be a significant speed advantage to ride sharing, rather than just a general feeling of virtue. We could do the same with the bus lanes on downtown streets, and let carpoolers just whiz by the gridlock. That’s the kind of thing that we might want to keep even after the strike’s finished.

Just a single layoff affects dozens of people:

• the person who’s let go
• the person’s family
• the managers who have to do the firing
• the person’s work friends, who’ll miss the lunchtime chats and drinks after work
• the person’s coworkers, who’ll have to pick up the extra load
• people from other organizations or members of the public who had dealings with the person
• the restaurant owner across the street, who always had a special curry set aside for his favorite customer
• (and so on)

When the slowdown became inescapable in November, many companies may have decided to postpone layoffs until after the Christmas holidays, out of kindness. The holidays are over now, and today (January 5) is the first day everyone will be back at work, so there could be a lot of postponed pain hitting all at once.

Are these just a few isolated incidents, or will today be the day that the economic slowdown starts to seem real to people in the tech industry?

This isn’t about class warfare: it doesn’t bother me that the CEOs took their bizjets from Detroit to Washington (CEOs take private jets so that they have more time to work on running their companies, not to show off), and many of the shareholders who stand to lose are private citizens’ 401Ks and pension funds, not rich industrialists.

This isn’t about environmental concerns: companies will make electric cars as soon as they think they can profit from them (would you buy an electric car as your principal car now, when you have to stop every 2-3 hours and plug it in overnight, the batteries are an environment catastrophe waiting to happen, and a lot of the electricity in the U.S. is generated from dirty coal?).

This isn’t about free-market purism: sometimes even healthy private organisations do need a little bridge financing to get through hard times, and in rare cases the government has to be the financier of last resort.

This is about not prolonging the agony: the existing three major North American car companies are obviously doomed, and all a little more money will do is delay the bankruptcies, mergers, and restructuring that might actually create a vibrant, healthy North American auto industry (maybe just one company instead of three).

No money pit

A bailout would also be a commitment to a money pit — after spending $25B$14B now, would the U.S. government be able to say ‘no’ to more in three months, when the industry burned through the first handout? What about another three months after that?

These aren’t healthy companies going through a rough spot — they were dying slowly even during the boom, when the world auto industry was way over capacity for demand, and Detroit was losing hundreds or thousands of dollars on every car they sold. GM burned through USD 4.2B cash in 2008Q3 alone, and that was mostly before the market meltdown.

Palliative care

The U.S. auto industry won’t disappear, but it has to change, and that change is going to be painful for the workers, their families, and their communities. It’s good that the U.S. government has decided not to make a pointless intervention leading to false hope and prolonged agony; now, though, it’s time to think about palliative care for the industry, while the workers grieve and then move on with their lives. Can the government help? How? $25B$14B to help communities would be a lot more useful than $25B into GM’s, Ford’s, and Chrysler’s petty cash boxes. But how to spend it?

Too little regulation? Lenders were able to use credit derivatives (such as collateralized debt obligations) to keep loans off their books, without any reliable way of assessing their risk (and thus, their actual value).

Too much regulation? Basel II (the regulatory response to previous banking crises) forced banks to reassess their reserves daily at market value — if the market started to fall, banks had to convert stocks to cash quickly to avoid falling below minimum reserve levels, massively magnifying even small stock market movements and encouraging banks to use credit derivatives to keep loans off their books.

Sinners? People (especially in the U.S.) went out and bought homes that they could never afford to pay for, on the assumption that home values would keep rising, then kept taking out more money against their mortgages to finance regular consumer spending.

Victims? Some of the financial instruments available to borrowers in the U.S., like negative amortization mortgages (pay less than the interest for the first few years), were deliberately designed to sucker in buyers who hadn’t quite mastered grade 5 math.

Too much government? By taking over bad loans from the banks, governments around the world have sent out the message that banks get to gain in the good times, but will be spared the pain in bad. Do they have any more incentive to be careful the next time around? Besides, all the government borrowing, especially in the U.S., has hardly helped the situation.

Too little government? Central banks could have stopped the housing bubble in its tracks by raising the prime interest rate (say, to 5 or 6% in the U.S.). Year after year, they passed on the opportunity, keeping interest rates low to keep the stock markets artificially high, and pumping more air in the housing bubble, leading to a bigger explosion this year than we really needed.

So, whether you’re a political candidate or just a Starbucks pundit, pick the statements above that best support what you already believe, and run with them. No matter what, you’ll probably be right.

Peason: “Get out.”

JFK: “That’s a stupid answer. Everyone knows that. The question is how do we get out?”

How, indeed? As JFK had finally come to understand, military conflicts, justified or not, are like a Chinese finger trap: it’s easy for a political leader to order the troops in, but very tricky to pull them back out (just ask the British about Northern Ireland, the Russians about Chechnya, or even Pearson’s Canadian successors about southern Afghanistan).

Good luck to President Clinton, President McCain, or President Obama (alphabetical order) in January 2009 — they’re all smart and well-intentioned people, but they’re going to find that the trap has already been pulled very tight, and there’s not much room left to wiggle free.

21 Feared Dead in Munich Crash.

About twenty one of the 44 passengers and crew of the British European Airways airliner which crashed yesterday near Munich carrying the Manchester United football team and many journalists are feared dead. About eight others are in hospital, seriously injured. Frank Swift, the former international goalkeeper, who had become a journalist, died in hospital.

I didn’t hear about any crash yesterday, but according to the Wikipedia article on Manchester United, there was a crash near Munich on 6 February 1958 that killed eight of the team’s players. In fact, when you follow the full story link in the posting, there is a story about the crash. The phrase “From the archive” is hidden in the deckline, but the dateline is “Saturday February 2, 2008” (probably automatically updated by the site). There’s nothing else in the online version to indicate that this is an archived story from 7 February 1958, though a Brit would probably know that British European Airways ceased operations in 1974.

This is an easy mistake to make trying to keep up a blog of current events, and I don’t mean to suggest that the maintainer is stupid, or that I couldn’t do the same thing — in fact, next December, watch this spot for postings about an air attack on Perl Harbor.

Amazon SimpleDB

Today, around 12:30 pm EDT, the Canadian loonie was worth more than the US greenback for the first time in 31 years (CBC story). By contrast, the Canadian dollar hit a low of somewhere around US $0.63 in the late 1990s.

According to Godwin’s law, that means that the debate is now over and the environment has lost. Gee, thanks!

Then I read about an alternative filesystem for Linux called ReiserFS, part of a new generation of journaling filesystems. Unlike the others, however, ReiserFS had a special innovation: it allowed multiple very small files to share the same block, so that a 5-byte file would not automatically take up 512 bytes (or whatever your block size was). I switched over, and bingo! There was suddenly a huge amount of free space on my previously-full hard drive, and I noticed no performance problems (aside from the occasional tiny zombie file that I couldn’t delete).

I’ve been running Reiser ever since, but the filesystem has fallen on hard times. On 14 September 2006 (via Tony Coates), Jeff Mahoney announced that the SuSE Linux distribution would no longer use ReiserFS as its default. Mahoney is also one of the principal ReiserFS developers, and he wrote that ReiserFS3 does not scale, that it has a small and shrinking developer community inadequate to maintain it, and that ReiserFS4 is “an interesting research file system, but that’s about as far as it goes.” Then, on 10 October 2006 Hans Reiser, the principal maintainer, was arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife Nina.

SuSE was the only Linux distribution that used Reiser as its default filesystem. This c|net story links the SuSE decision with the murder charges, but it’s worth noting that Mahoney’s message predates the charges by almost a month. Whatever the cause, however, Novell (SuSE’s owner) had contributed significant resources towards the maintenance of ReiserFS. It no longer looks like ReiserFS has any future at all, and in its current state, it has performance and scalability problems that prevent its use in high-demand environments. ReiserFS was a big help to me when I needed it a few years back, but the next time I install Ubuntu, I’ll use the default ext3 filesystem instead. Hard disks — even for notebook computers — are a lot bigger and cheaper now, anyway.

You don’t have to worry. We just posted a blog entry on this topic. Yahoo Search APIs are going strong – we welcome developers to use our APIs.

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000393.html

Amit Kumar
Manager, Site Explorer

Thanks, Amit. Fortunately, megginson.com isn’t popular enough that it will break Yahoo’s 5,000 queries/day quota.

SOAP, REST, JSON, XML, and Serialized PHP

Note that Yahoo has a REST interface that can deliver results in XML, JSON, or serialized PHP, so if people get tired of the REST vs. SOAP perma-debate, there’s some alternative material for you here (if you want a good roaring debate, be careful to avoid reading Tim Bray’s carefully balanced view).