Your kitchen sink leaks, you look up a plumber, call him and he comes and fixes it. The UDDI equivalent for this is: Your kitchen sink leaks, you look up somebody who might be someone like a plumber but you really don't know what to look for, you call him and he's going to bring all the wrong wrenches. [Clemens Vasters]

Or possibly, the plumber tells you to bring your sink over so he can fix it. My problem with UDDI is that it really doesn't do much to further automatic interconnection. This sort of advertising works well for free services, but really doesn't address how people can monetize web services. Sure, you might discover a useful service, but when you find it, you have to pick up the phone, and arrange a business relationship out of band. Furthermore, as Clemens points out, you've got a whole new level of protocol negotiation at the WSDL level that's unaddressed. So it seems to me that the whole problem that UDDI sets out to address isn't a very interesting one to solve.

Bob Beauchmin did mention an interesting concept at the March DevCon, where he suggested that geographic information might be a really interesting application for UDDI. In the travel business, one application might be for airlines to advertise what cities they serve. Then you could query on city pairs, asking for example "What airlines fly between Denver and Miami?" The answer to this question would let you know what airlines to query for fares for that route, for example. However, in real world fare search applications, it's a lot harder than that; for example on some routings, the best fares come from combining carriers. So the query gets pretty complex, and I'm not sure that UDDI is the right way to go about organizing that information.

Patrick Lightbody was writing about being in Cinque Terre. Lots of memories. My wife and I were there last October, now Patrick has me wanting to go back. Funny comment about Americans dominating there - I swear there were more Americans in Vernazza than Italians. Rick Steves has promoted CT so much that it's probably not at all like it was even a few years ago. Patrick likes Riomaggiore the best; we stayed in Vernazza and liked that the best. Probably you end up liking where you are the best. In Vernazza, we stayed way up the hill just below the upper guard tower, with a fantastic ocean view from the patio. Awesome restaurant down by the harbor in Vernazza, with tables next to the tiny beach. Oh, man. My productivity's shot for the day now.