Cognitive dissonance is how Dare Obasanjoaptly describes the emergence of someof the Smart Tags concepts previously introduced by Microsoft and now emulated by the new google toolbar's autolink feature(Greg Linden explains the problem with clarity).

Anyway, back to cognitive dissonance. Could this be the reason for the following?

  1. Open Source products are increasingly database specific even though they could be database independent via Open Source ODBC SDK efforts such as iODBC and unixODBC. We increasinglynarrowing our choices down to database specific "Closed Source" or database specific "Open Source" solutions and somehow deem thisto beprogress
  2. The prevalent use of free standards compliant data accessdrivers (ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET) or their native counterparts that remain vulnerable to simple password hacks (there are databases behind those dynamic web sites!!) as none of these have any notion of "rules based" authentication and data access policy
  3. The time-tested fallacy that: "select * from table" defines a viable RDBMS engine since Transaction Atomicity, Concurrency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) mean zip! Ditto scrollable cursors, stored procedures, and other presumably useless aspects of any marginably decent RDBMS engine
  4. Failing to comprehend that a Weblog is your property (if you have a personal blog) not the property of the vendor hosting your service (that important issue of separating data ownership and data storage again). You may haveheard about, or experienced,total loss of weblog and/or weblogarchives arising from weblog engine or blog service provider changeovers
  5. Failing to see the synergy between personal/group/corporate information stores (aka infobase)such as Wikis, Weblogs, and the burgeoning semantic web. Jon Udellfor instance, is trying to get the point across via his tireless collection ofXQuery/XPath based queries aimed at the blogosphere section of the burgeoning semantic web. Here are some of mine (scoped to this weblog):
    • Security related posts to date (XPath query)
    • Infobase related posts to date (Free Text search)

And more...