Agreed. It was a carefully orchestrated move by Google to break Nature's boycott on publishing papers on "cold fusion" (aka LENR). LENR researcher M. McKubre of SRI says, "It was very important for team-G to create separation from "us" [established LENR researchers]. Had they not done so there would have been no Nature publication." Google avoided ties to established LENR researchers at MIT, SRI, Toyota, Mitsubishi, NASA, Siemens, National Instruments, etc. in order to open up publication opportunities for others. Very clever. As the Google team concludes, "We hope our journey will inspire others to produce and contribute data in this intriguing parameter space."

As Camembert mentioned, Authorware was one of the first to let e-learning developers build flows and then publish the code. Though it was really easy to use it was pre-www and a Flash-like plugin was required to have it stream. Low bandwidths at the time also meant it was really only useful for intranet applications. Since then, the founder of Authorware created ZebraZapps, which is a SaaS tool using a more robust flow charting to output code either as .ipa or .apk apps or as Flash. They're working on an HTML5 player version so that people won't be forced to distribute to desktops via Flash, but authoring still requires the plugin.

I've been waiting for someone to put my idea into practice for over 5 years: http://www.core77.com/challenge/memory/ I still favor topical application rather than subcutaneous, but that's just me. Rensselaer should step it up though with video, Skype accounts and Hulu.