Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

An interesting debate over the merits of the Amazon API versus the Google API: the Amazon API is dirt-simple to use; simply pass parameters to it via the URL, as you would any Web page, and you get the results back in pure XML (Simon St. Laurent points out that the Amazon API is very REST-like). Google, on the other hand, requires that a SOAP call to be fashioned and POSTed. It seems pretty laborious when you realize that there’s nothing Google’s giving us that couldn’t be done via a URL. A SOAP interface makes more sense if you need to send and receive complex datatypes (something beyond a one-dimensional list of name-value pairs) to invoke a particular method over a network, but you have to question whether all that overhead is really necessary just to get a list of search results or spelling suggestions.

That being said, I think I just answered my own question. Weblog aggregators need not implement something so complex as an XML-RPC interface in order to receive a ping from blogware. Wouldn’t a single public URI suffice? Just agree on some parameters and go with it. http://www.weblogs.com/ping?site_id=xxxx Could it be any simpler?