Dave Sifry's provided an API to the Techno Rati data. Dave Winer wishes for XmlRpc, which re-raises the REST debate, which TimBray gives a good intro for. But Dave says it was beside the point, which is that he had to hand-write more code to handle the interface, which would have been automatic with XmlRpc. It would be interesting to see a more detailed side-by-side comparison of the steps to handle the API, esp when the API changed the second day. Was Dave ignoring tools that are available? Or is that the tools aren't available in [Frontier Script]? I'd like some meat...

• May17: Mark Bernstein follows some of this conversation, also pointing to the quick evolution of Aaron Swartz's solution Xml Tramp toolkit

Dave Winer hates the use of an [AppKey]. TimBray agrees it's annoying. Why not use Basic Auth for authentication, and make the [AppKey] the [ID]? Then the [AppKey] doesn't have to be part of the URI.

It's not a bad idea. I can even make it more human-readable, and rther than ask for the appkey, I can ask for the user's Technorati username/pasword, so it is easier to remember. The appkey is a nice way to associate a single resource with a user using a one-way hash, that's all. Interesting points. --Dave Sifry

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