Tim Anderson did an interview with me at Microsoft’s Mix06 conference, which he’s crafted into several different articles. What I found most interesting was the creative way he “remixed” the interview. He took one chunk out of the middle, and put it together with a separate interview with Jeff Barr, Amazon’s web services evangelist,
The result is a piece called WS-* vs. the REST, which focuses on why simplicity matters in web services APIs. Probably the most controversial thing he got me to say on the record was that the WS-* stack was in part “a strategy tax that was imposed by the big companies on some of this technology, where they made it more complicated than it needed to be so they could sell tools.” (I admit it wasn’t just machiavellian, though. Some companies really do believe that complex coding tools are better than simple, human-writable approaches.)
Tim took another piece of the interview and turned it into a separate article called Web 2.0 moves into the mainstream: “O’Reilly sees the trend extending to manufacturing. ‘You’ll be able to put together pluggable supply chains at a much lower level. I would be very surprised if we don’t end up with an eBay for manufacturing, where people match up supply and demand over the internet.’”
Nice. I’d like to see more of this. So often you do a long interview, and it just ends up as a line or two in an article. Great to see a journalist mining an interview for several articles.