Adam Bosworth has written an interesting article about what we can (or have to) learn from The Web.
He is talking about how it has teached us how to manage and distribute data and what it means for the Semantic Web and for the databases, and that standards such as Atom and RSS 2.0 will become increasingly important in the future.
Here is his conclusion (although I strongly recommend you to read the whole article):
TIME FOR DATABASE VENDORS TO STEP UP TO THE PLATE Distributed computing has been learning and evolving in response to the lessons of the Web. Formats and protocols are arising to overcome the limitations of XML—even as XML in turn arose to overcome the limitations of CORBA and DCOM. It is time that the database vendors stepped up to the plate and started to support a native RSS 2.0/Atom protocol and wire format; a simple way to ask very general queries; a way to model data that encompasses trees and arbitrary graphs in ways that humans think about them; far more fluid schemas that don’t require complex joins to model variations on a theme about anything from products to people to places; and built-in linear scaling so that the database salespeople can tell their customers, in good conscience, for this class of queries you can scale arbitrarily with regard to throughput and extremely well even with regard to latency, as long as you limit yourself to the following types of queries. Then we will know that the database vendors have joined the 21st century.The Web is certainly changing the way we are viewing the world in many ways...