News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 18 (entry 0)

Wed Mar 18 2009 21:39: A couple quick links.

• Neo Classic Space showcases slick modern legO constructions conforming to the blue-dominant 80s aesthetics of the classic space sets.
• If you demand real spaceships, NASA Images is a pretty good attempt to make all of NASA's cool images easy to find. One step closer to my space probe data portal.
• Chrontendo is chronogaming the Famicom/NES in video form. One video a month covering 15 games. Unlike most online videos of NES games, this guy is taking each game seriously on its own terms. This is a huge project; there's like 20 hours of video and he's about 1/10 done.
• At QCon I met a couple people from the Guardian who were working on a project that turned out to be the Guardian Open Platform. The New York Times, whose nerds are apparently the bitter rivals of the Guardian nerds, also recently released a web service for article search. The Guardian web service wins for giving you the full body of the story.

  A lot of brain cells are needlessly expended on Web Service Design. If you're a newspaper or other data repository the web service design is not too difficult. Just put the damn thing on the web in machine-readable form. It can be as simple as putting up a directory listing.

  Semi-relatedly, I really dislike the use of "API" language when speaking of web services. It makes a web service sound like a C library, which in turn (or so I fear) makes people think it's acceptable to put C libraries online and call them web services. Yes, I know that the official name of the Launchpad web service is the "Launchpad web API". This is a battle I consistently lose.