Elsewhere on APIs and downloads

The big GIS industry blogs are debating one of my favorite topics: download or API?. In my posts I was considering downloads and web APIs with the same media type and data: a big bucket of GML features (for example) in a file vs spoonfuls of GML features via WFS. James Fee, instead, is considering APIs that are lossy for one reason or another (candidates: format conversion, aggregation and clustering, geometry simplification, or attribute filtering). Life's too short to listen to podcasts (that aren't This American Life), though... was there anything interesting in the Directions one?