As someone who is working in a software shop building an extensive set of SOAP based web services via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) it's refreshing to have posts like this that make you feel like what your doing is right on the money....or not! :)  For internet facing web services I agree with Dare that REST is where it's at.  I'm not convinced that they're the answer for all problems....at least not yet.

For anyone unfamiliar with RESTful web services I recommend you pick up RESTful Web Services  by Sam Ruby and Leonard Richardson. About 6 months ago I started reading a draft copy of it and was very impressed.  It provides an excellent introduction to how to build RESTful web services and explains many of the core concepts that are necessary for fully grokking REST.