Good article from Gene Kan on the theory and practice of Open Web Services — network resources that are shared by private concerns with the commonweal.

Your set-top box will run an Open Service whether or not you know it. It will cooperate with other set-top boxes in your locality to provide video-on-demand services for your neighbors. Obviously, this reduces the buildout necessary to enable video-on-demand. So, Open Services can work for Big Media too.

Open Services are growing in popularity because they make sense for so many different types of applications. Plug in an 802.11b hub, share that recipe for fried spam, and leave your computer alone so it can help us find our intergalactic friends.

My favorite part of all this is that none of it happened at Stanford.

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