Jon Udell at InfoWorld - Web apps, just give me the data:

"Scraping data off Web pages can be effective, but it’s far from ideal. Although we think of the Web as a rich trove of data, the pickings are depressingly slim if you want to transform or recombine that data. And there’s no good reason why that should be so. It’s easy to make data available for reuse by human analysts or automatic services."