Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools.

A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem - how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. I can't imagine any better preparation for the work I do now.

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach.

But the best teams I've encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.