Mashups + MySQL + Metatagging = MMM goodness

I often speak about how I'm looking forward to the day when the internet moves from being a platform for content publishing to a massively distributed database.

The 'mashup' buzz is about essentially just that. Taking the data from one or more sites and re-using it in a novel manner.

It occurred to me that many sites and blogs are already using MySQL databases to store their content -- so it wouldn't be that great a leap to create a public access mode for some of the data stored in these databases.

What we need is a simple, open protocol for searching and retrieving data not only from a local MySQL database, but any MySQL database with its entries tagged as 'public'.