Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be a difficult concept to wrap your head around, which is really more a comment on the concept than the capabilities of your head-like "Web 2.0" there is still considerable debate over what truly constitutes SOA, and in between the misunderstandings and disagreements there is plenty of room for vendors to twist the term to favor their own brand of solution. Beyond that, there as yet are relatively few decent implementations of SOA for proponents to point to and say "That's what we're talking about."

But Joe McKendrick has made it a little easier to do so with this collection of pointers to various examples of SOA in the wild.

The list reads like cheerleading, and it is-but it's not intended as a balanced evaluation of the effects of SOA in the enterprise, because it's a little early for that. Instead, it's a resource for looking at what people are actually doing in the field and getting some sense of what a well-conceived and constructed service-oriented architecture looks like.