Learning from THE WEB,
by Adam Bosworth,
ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 8 – October 2005.

Bosworth, who has worked for Microsoft, BEA, and now Google draws interesting conclusions from
how people use the web and how and why the web
works. Although he doesn’t address libraries directly, he does compare and contrast the way the web functions with how databases function — and that has relevance to libraries and how we do things. His first few points tell
a lot of his story:

• Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex … ones.
• It is worth making things simple…
• It is acceptable to be stale much of the time.
• The wisdom of crowds works amazingly well.

This article is in an ACM magazine and the article makes free use of terms like latency, asynchrony, and “loosely coupled.” Nevertheless, Bosworth uses simple examples that even the non-technically oriented person can understand, though he is making very technical points.

A related article that makes some of the same points is
The two-way data web, By Jon Udell,
InfoWorld, November 23, 2005, in which
he discusses how the Atom and RSS syndication formats are evolving into tools for creating loosely coupled databases on Internet scale.

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