See Giving Away the Farm, on this “Web 2.0 as sharecropping” trend.

External tools have their place, but I’d be reluctant to put my publication’s eggs in that basket. Publications embracing doesn’t mean you don’t have to invest in it / master it.

This blog entry is very interesting to me. When my firm launched the web’s first Database-as-a-Service offering in 1999 (before Caspio), we did tout our service as something that would let a company avoid programming. But that was only part of the story. For small businesses that needed a web database on the cheap, they would generally just forget about the need if they need to spend bucks on a developer. But they’d use our service instead. Now after a while, many of our customers out grew our service and eventually did build a custom web app. That’s fine to us, we just provided an alternative in the early going.

The web merely lowers the barrier to entry for people to get into online publishing. It doesn’t, however, lower the standards we as a community have. That’s why you have sites like http://havenworks.com put out by people who are “technologically enabled”. http://portfolio.com , on the other hand, is put out by someone with chops. Someone who knows what they’re doing.

If you slight the amount of work and knowledge involved in putting out a good product with phrases such as “No more programming for custom web applications”, you’re going to end up with a communist—”everyone gets the same thing”—style future.

Do you think http://everyblock.com would run on caspio? No! It takes knowledgeable people putting in actual effort to create something interesting.

But don’t take my word for it: http://www.jacobian.org/writing/2007/sep/12/db-journalism/

Caspio is to developers as Blogger.com is to journalism.

When a third-party or contributed search app for Django becomes a near-standard (I doubt just one will make it into trunk), then that might go a long way towards making that gap smaller.

Developers could also create site/platform-specific search apps that take, say, a CSV file and create a search app from it. That’s being done today; it’s just that it usually requires a few commands rather than point-and-click.

As Justin says above, to make this almost *too* easy can lead to 1,001 nearly identical data apps, which isn’t really an ideal situation. But there are a few steps that could narrow that space a bit, if not close it completely.

I recently had a conversation with a newsy web editor who said something along the lines of “somebody needs to make an open source, fuller-featured caspio that doesn’t drive people crazy.”

What’s your answer to something like that? What kind of “space,” for lack of a better word, do you see between Caspio’s browser based GUI approach and the supposedly daunting Dive Into Django?