there are alot of interesting free tools out there, one of them i just ran into is the yahoo news web services. its nice to see i can implement this all via json. the biggest disappointment is all the work around that needs to be done because of browser security. although this would be a great time for me to learn json i'd rather not have to implement the work arounds. most likely ill just consume the web services via xml from my server. i'll have to implement a xml parser, but i believe the final solution will be more flexible in terms of my overall architecture.