I’m sitting in Jason Hunter’s Web Services Tutorial at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium. It’s not the usual web services talk … Jason gives a lot of interesting examples, and essentially ignores the low-level mechanics of SOAP in favor of showing you how to do it, and do it easily. Most of his examples deal with the most useful web services out there right now: the Google and Amazon web services APIs. It’s a great talk full of extremely practical information.

But I do notice a disturbing trend in the example services. So far we’ve seen:

• Does Google know how to spell my name?
• How often does Google crawl my website?
• Darn! Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is a more popular Hunter than I am.
• How’s my book selling compared to the latest Tom Clancy?

This is getting more meaningful all the time. :-)