Michael Kimsal (and his bother Mark) were talking about the state of ecommerce applications, specifically about the latest "hot topic" software - Magento.

My brother Mark has been doing a long term project based on Magento doing a lot of custom work on top of it, and has told me many points, both good and bad, about it.

According to Michael and Mark, speed of the application is a big hindrance. They also mention two points that could help make an ecommerce system so much easier to integrate into the "blogosphere" - publishing a blog feed of some of the user feedback about orders/products/etc and accept trackbacks from an external blog post reviewing the products.