Who are we serving with a newspaper? Readers, people who consume the newspaper. In addition, we are serving customers - people who post ads in the classifieds section, event managers who want to post in an events calendar, advertisers who want to appear in specific sections, that kind of thing.

We will extend this periodical system in the near future to allow, for example, and online Anthropology periodical. Here our primary customer is the author. In the publish-or-perish world of the university, this is likely to be the first (and possibly only) location where a creator of original work may be published. The reader is more like a target audience in this case, though they are also being served.

If one person wants to refer to a paper in an email or an article on oreilly.net, how long do we maintain that URI?

What kinds of legal protections are there for original work? What kinds of permissions are needed for reprints of original work? Is there a mechanism, a complex interaction or just a permissions object of some kind, that can handle this front-end access filtering?

Do we allow this request, do we accept credentials, do we deliver content? What does a preexisting contract look like? Can dynamic contracts be negotiated, what does this look like?

Can we trade service-for-service as a medium of barter, how does one assign valuations to a service?

A periodical may not keep its own persistent storage, but rather access it as another service. I can see a whole tree of services or service nodes involved in the production of a particular service.

How far up the tree does responsibility go? How far down the tree does blame go?