Gould Effect

I warn you now, this is going to seem overly technical to many, but this new Dapper service is going to have a big impact on the superinformationhighway. What this does is allow a moderately technical user, without actually writing code, to rapidly create mashups of multiple web sites. It collects information from any site, and spits out XML, RSS, or whatever sort of "feed" one needs to create charts, personalized portals, metasearch engines, etc...without permission of the original sites. The legal implications alone are interesting, but the reason why you should care is that, (1) this makes personalization a commodity, and (2) it opens up content sources far beyond those currently available for consumption in a newsreader or on a personalized home page by Google, Yahoo, etc...