Time (just) for a Friday folly. A couple of days ago the latest edition of the Catalogue of Life (CoL) arrived in my mailbox in the form of a DVD and booklet: While in some ways it's wonderful that the Catalogue of Life provides a complete data dump of its contents, this strikes me as a rather old-fashioned way to distribute it. So I began to wonder how this could be done differently, and started to think of CouchDB.