But isn't it all data?  Although web content certainly is an important type of information available on a web site, Data needs to be treated differently.  Here I'm talking about Data with a capital D -- I thought the Wikipedia description was good: "Data refers to a collection of organized information, usually the results of experience, observation or experiment, or a set of premises. This may consist of numbers, words, or images, particularly as measurements or observations of a set of variables."  Here are some of the ways that Data is different:

1. People expect Data to be available in different Formats.
2. Users want to manipulate the Data.
3. You don't totally control your Data, since it is available in different Channels.

There are several implications of this including:

• Formats.  You may wish to standardize the formats that your data is available in.  Is all your data always available in csv (if that's what you standardize on)?  This includes both the formats themselves (Excel, Stata, etc) and also the method by which the data is requested.  For instance, is there one place that users can directly get all your data?  Directly doesn't mean some thin layer with links to databases each doing its own thing.  An example consistent format would be a web service with a published set of parameters by which the data could be requested.  Ideally, all the institutions data would be available from this one web service.
• Manipulation.  Sometimes people just want to see your data, but usually they will want to manipulate the data.  By providing your data in consistent formats, then it will be easier for your users to utilize your data.  Other users will expect that *you* provide the tools for manipulation of your own data. 
• Channels.  Ideally you will work to directly feed data to primary channels.  For instance, if you feed data directly to services like Swivel then you both get more use out of your data and also can ensure your data is available in its highest quality (not watered down by other people copying and pasting your data, for example). 

The prior post Taxonomy Mappings: Be Careful When Integrating gave some examples and described the problem of taxonomy mappings.  Related to that is false precision in your tags.  In thinking about this more, it occurs to me that there are probably two useful rules of thumb to keep in mind whenever tagging/pulling content (whether the content is automatically tagged, or mapped from another taxonomy, or mapped by hand):

1. You can't tag in a course grained taxonomy and pull based on a fine-grained taxonomy (for example, if you have a system that only tags to "Washington, DC Metro Area," then you won't be able to pull by "Washington, DC" since any content tagged in the system may only be relevant to "Alexandria, VA").
2. You can't tag in a fine-grained taxonomy when you only are using coarse information to determine the tagging (for example, if all you know about a group of content is that they're all animals, you can't tag each of content to frogs, cats, dogs, etc).

In both of these cases, when you pull by the fine-grained taxonomy there is a false sense of precision (and you can get grossly wrong.Another way of stating the rules of thumb above:

1. You have to originally tag (or possibly go through the effort of retro-actively tagging, perhaps through automated concept extraction) all content to at least as fine-grained a taxonomy as you're going to pull from,
2. without artificially tagging more precisely than you are accurate.

Of course, by far the most preferable treatment is that all content, across the various systems you want to pull from (onto the same web page, for example) is tagged to the same, fine-grained taxonomy (or at as fine grained as you ever expect to need to pull from).  Otherwise you'll have to resort to taxonomy mappings, or retroactively tag content.

The natural temptation on planning a product's roadmap is to plan far into the future.  That temptation arises for reasons such as wanting to please clients by telling them you'll give them what they say they want, wanting to relay the internal technical teams' plans to deliver something far in the future, feeling that you already know the list of features that users want, and not wanting to feel like you're planning all the time.  In my experience, that is less successful than trying to only plan and publicize a short time horizon out (and not even promising anything outside that time horizon).  Here are some of the reasons:

• You're always delivering something.  In other words, the user regularly sees progress.
• Related to the above bullet, it forces you to think of creative ways of solving your users' problems.  If you know you have to deliver something in the next month, then you have to carefully explore the requirements, prioritize, and come up with some unexpected solutions.
• Quick responses to what you release:
  • When something needs to be tweaked that you just released, you can quickly move to the next iteration.
  • If your idea turns out to be a real stinker, you can drop it before you spend a lot of time on it.
  • If you have an unexpected hit of an idea, you can quickly continue to refine it.
• Inevitable slips don't end up cascading tons of other deliverables (if all you promise is delivering 10 features in the next three months, then if three slip it only affects those three -- if you had promised 10 each quarter for the next year, then if three items slip in the first quarter then probably 37 items slip for the year).
• Combats somewhat against almost everyone's natural propensity to procrastinate.  If there are always items that need to be publicly delivered, then it's harder to procrastinate than if you have some huge delivable a year out. 
• A regular period that people expect a progress report.  Some advantages: a) the potential "embarassment" factor makes you pay close attention on a regular basis, and, moreover, b) your clients know they will be engaged in the discussion of your progress.
• The further out you plan, the less accurate you are about the schedule.
• You can respond more quickly to changes in your industry or competition.  If you've already publicly planned a year out, then if, for example Web 4.0 hits the scene quickly, you've either got to upset a lot of people that are already expecting a bunch of features that year (by slipping those to make room for Web 4.0 now) or not even consider adding the Web 4.0 features until after the year has passed!

I partially read the following a while ago that helped convince me to push toward short delivery schedules: Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman and Getting Real by 37signals. 

Since posting Enabling the Interaction Publisher, I've done some more research on mashup builders.   I found a lot of excellent resources (see end of this post for a list), but felt that a summary of what's out there would be helpful (this is what I would have liked to see when I researched this).  Although lists of tools exist, I wasn't getting a sense of the overall space.  Note that I believe that mashup editors are only part of enabling the interaction publisher: the other parts being standardized access to data (particularly all data from one institution) and deeply embedding these types of tools in content management systems (for instance, using topic-driven templates already in your CMS to drive mashups that are driven by those topics). 

Some of the particular variables that are probably most relevant in what tool you should use for your particular application / situation:

• Is the expectation that you will quickly have a mashup, or that you are building out an infrastructure for your institution?  Does this need to be behind your firewall?  Do you need guaranteed uptime?  Basically, do you need this to be hosted (quick and easy, get-me-started-now) or will you build out and manage the infrastructure?
• Do you want the end result of your efforts to be another data feed, a map, or other types of user interactions like data grids?  What should the output be?
• What types of inputs do you need to pull: structured (if so, generic XML, or just RSS/atom specifically), unstructured (like web pages), or direct database connections?
• How are the mashups built?  Do you need totally non-technical people to create, or do you just need to support your power users?  What is the mashup building environment for building the feeds (create-a-flowchart like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly?)? 
• What are the browser requirements for people to use / consume your mashups (for instance Microsoft Popfly requires both Silverlight and recent versions of just Firefox and IE)?  
• Can a mashup be embedded into an existing web page? I didn't find enough useful information on this to fill this out meaningfully in the table below, so perhaps this is something to add in the future.

Although I was hoping to put together a fuller spreadsheet of all the tools out there, I selected a subset that was either easy to start using or had very clear documentation (I used all to at least some extent but AquaLogic Pages).  At any rate, here's a brief (and admittedly incomplete) table comparing different mashup builders along the criteria listed above (please comment with any corrections/additions):

I found the easiest to use were Apatar, StrikeIron SOA Express for Excel, and Yahoo! Pipes (if you just want to play with something to get a feel for mashup editors, I'd recommend starting with these), although each is entirely different.  Although QEDwiki has a great intro video and appears to be able to do a lot, I got the least far actually using it.  Although I'm sure that someone that knows Dapper inside and out could create a feed from scraping pages, in practice I didn't manage to get it to do the two tests I tried (for example, in trying to scrape country pages from the World Bank site, it wouldn't let me since the different pages were coming from different domains although they were driven from the same CMS).  Popfly seemed interesting, but doesn't appear to be geared toward the enterprise and has very specific browser requirements.  That said, these were just initial impressions (and initial ease of use may be irrelevant for a particular application) -- the main purpose of this post was to put together the matrix above just getting a feel for the current overall state / scope of mashup editors. 

Here are some excellent resources on mashup editors:

• blog post: Mashups: Mashup Maker Smackdown
• Enterprise Web 2.0 blog
• Mashups category on Naked Open Source blog
• blog post: Why Mashups = (REST + ‘Traditional SOA’) * Web 2.0
• blog post: Mashup Business Models
• Programmable Web site

I've been thinking about and researching how an institution can share its data, documents, and other content.  Obviously your data and content is already exposed via the web, but providing the data in a more structured way allows more users (both internal and external) to manipulate the data in interesting ways, for example in mashups.  There seem to be a few ways to share data from an enterprise with a lot of content:

• Straight RSS/Atom.  Although straight RSS/Atom (with no custom extensions / namespaces) may not be that interesting, it's obviously a useful way to get your content out there.  Typically straight RSS/Atom is fairly time-based and might in effect show some history (news items like "John goes to work" and then "John goes home") rather than some state (like "John is now home"). 

• Common repositories / services such as Swivel and StrikeIron.   Rather than exposing your data/content directly to the outside world from your site/servers, you can use an intermediary.  Swivel allows users to create their own graphs on fata from either official sources or any user-supplied data.  StrikeIron is built into mashup editors like QEDwiki, and also has built an extension to Excel to call their services.  You probably would want to provide data to these services through an API of your own, but you could get started with Swivel for example by directly uploading the data. 
• Specialized XML formats for particular types of content.  Examples include OpenSearch for search results and SDMX for statistical data.  These specific XML formats both allow a level of sophistication for people specializing in your type of content and allows tools built for this type of data to consume it.  This fits in with the following item, which, for historical reasons may or may not be XML-based. 
  
• Institution-to-institution services.  Sometimes you need to provide a point-to-point interface with another institution.  In that case, you may need to support all sorts of unusual formats and delivery mechanisms.  Hopefully you could leverage your various systems' web services to just transform the data into the formats you need. 
• A common API that your institution follows across all types of content.   This one is the most interesting to me and one that I alluded to in my previous post on interaction publishing.  Especially if your institution has various repositories, one possible approach would be to slap up a page that has links to the different instructions for referencing each.  But, to make access as easy as possible, a common API with consistent parameters that can be queried against all systems would be preferable (for instance, queries such as "give me all your documents and data on Chad" via url requests like http://xml.example-domain.com/apis/type=docs,data&country=td).  Potentially the returned XML could be in a simple format such as RSS extended with a custom namespace (so that other tools such as Yahoo Pipes, and even feedreaders, could easily consume the data).
• Microformats.  Probably most useful to future browsers or other tools like the Firefox Operator extension (or for services that crawl sites such as Google), microformats allow you to just change your existing HTML a bit to expose very common types of data like address and calendar events.  For example, instead of your HTML having "100 Main Street, Anytown, USA" it would be marked up as "<div class="adr"> <div class="street-address">100 Main Street</div>, <span class="locality">Anytown</span>, <div class="country-name">USA</div></div>" and then define the CSS to show it as you wish.  For example (with sloppy CSS):
  
  100 Main Street

  Anytown,
  

  U.S.A.

  See how this page appears in Firefox Operator (also notice the tagspaces):