A day after posting my critique on Autodesk Seek I came across this presentation Mike Haley of the Seek team gave in March. Boy I wish that I had come across this last week as it answers some of the outstanding questions that I posed. The video covers the technologies that Seek is composed of, i.e. Atom syndication feeds (PartAtom), schema design, Amazon EC2 and open source modules. The entire thing looks surprisingly good (and open) for a big company like Autodesk. The presentation is an hour long but worth watching as it is probably the most significant thing one of the big-AEC software vendors have attempted on the Internet.
Another interesting thing Mike mentions is that Amazon are working on Windows-based EC2 instances...