I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).
I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettiness, without being either good businessmen or fine judges of literature. All that is necessary in the production of a book is an author and a bookseller, without the intermediate parasite.
George Bernard Shaw
This is easily extrapolated to the design and development world.
The Guardian just released a news feed plugin for WordPress as a part of its Open Platform initiative, making it easy for anyone to post Guardian stories to their WordPress-powered site in full, images and all. They’re working on other platforms as well.
Oh, and did I mention ads? Because they’re including ads and performance tracking in the stories too.
This is smart on so many levels – when so many other publishers are trying to lock everything down, the Guardian sees the future and is going to make money from it.
If you aren’t familiar with The Guardian’s efforts on the Web, you should be. They have an absolutely amazing team of developers building out their platform, which includes a content API, politics API and curated data sets.
As they put it “Our vision is to weave the Guardian into the fabric of the Internet, to become ‘of’ the web rather than ‘on’ the web.”