Doc Searls:  Hey, coffee and wine shops, I'll be in town for the next day with a laptop and a PDA that are wondering who's ready for my business ?

This problem doesn't seem all that much harder to me than syndicating and aggregating weblogs.  In particular, both ends of the equation are likely to be behind a combination of firewalls, NAT, proxies, etc.  Question to ponder: what technical, sociological, and legal innovations will be required to make this come about?

One interesting thing this scenario highlights is the potential need for multiple credentials to be transmitted along with the request

  4:55:13 PM   Comment 

Jon Udell:  The basic LibraryLookup bookmarklet is a kind of intermediary. It coordinates two classes of services -- Amazon/BN/isbn.nu/AllConsuming and your local library's OPAC -- to facilitate a lookup. I couldn't resist trying to create another intermediary that would facilitate a purchase request.

Excellent.

Question to ponder: what is the chance that this code will continue to work, unmodified, three years from now?  What technical, sociological, and legal innovations will be required to make this come about?

  4:41:54 PM   Comment 

Greg Reinacker: So, everyone, how about implementing TrackBack and/or Pingback on your weblogs - and let's see where it takes us?  My guess is that the next logical step is trackback threading.  This represents a small challenge for those of us who comingle trackbacks and direct comments, but I'm sure that this can be overcome.

Amusingly, trackback is to linkbackparser as Mark's cite logic is to mine.

  4:35:38 PM   Comment 

Shelley Powers: Additionally, I would also like people to start putting their code online. This last week there was a great deal of discussion about the CITE tag and how it can be used to provide specialized processing. Well, that's great and good, but let's see the processing? Can we see the code that Mark used. Or Sam's code?

I publish the code for my weblog, such as it is.  Search for "cite" in blosxom.  The index page is generated by a separate script.  You can see the similarity between the two... given how quickly this was thrown together (I had no advanced knowledge of what Mark was working on), I did a bit of cut and paste instead of a proper refactoring.  Also note that contrary to popular belief, my implementation is not based on the cite tag.

  4:20:02 PM   Comment