Tim O'Reilly has spoken often over the last year about how to apply the ideals of open source with the slow and eventual shift from dependence on software to dependence on information. The new software is 'infoware'. In Applying Distributed XML toward The Open Source Paradigm Shift to Infoware, I propose that we can preserve the freedoms to innovate with data and to fork infoware by working with locally hosted xml files like we do with RSS.
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XML is expected to be everywhere in the future.
Imagine a Real Estate agency that provides a web site to its customers/prospects. Those fill in the data about a good they want to sell (house). The data goes to a remote large open-source real-estate database in XML format. Other people enter the website, look for a house and find theirs.
Anyone can create an API to query/feed the database from Real-Estate web sites around the country/world.
This is just an example, but it will happen for price comparison on a large scale (everything, everywhere), dictionaries, knowledge databases, encyclopedias, research and development, people directories, companies rating, companies directories, etc...
Information is easy to use, provided by everyone, and accessed by everyone.
Welcome to XML.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is doubtful.
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
Note: I'm not particularly happy with this, but I have to agree with the article I've linked.