On designing for a world where pages are joined by data and APIs, not just links — first given at the Future of Web Apps, London.
I gave this talk first at Future of Web Apps in London in February 2006, then reworked it a few times that year for XTech and ETech, and again the following year for dConstruct under the title Designing for a Web of Data. I'd spent the previous couple of years running a small R&D team in Radio and Music at the BBC, and had just landed at Yahoo — new enough that I made a point of saying, on stage, that none of this was official company thinking.
The premise was simple, if it wasn't obvious yet in 2006: the web was quietly turning from a network of pages joined by hyperlinks into a network of data, joined by APIs. Blogging platforms and the first wave of "Web 2.0" services were producing structured information faster than anyone had a design language for treating it as first-class material.
Start designing with data, not pages. Give every object in your system a permanent, structured, human-readable address.
The clearest proof of the idea came out of work I did with colleagues back at the BBC around the same time: Programme Information Pages, a permanent, structured web page for every programme the BBC broadcast. Looking back at it now, most of the "aggregate web" is just how the web works today — that's really the best outcome a talk like this can hope for.