Norwegian Rubyist August Lilleaas has been busy putting together a ton of examples of using the Net::HTTP Ruby library that comes with most Ruby distributions. I asked him if it'd be okay to put some of them directly on Ruby Inside for reference purposes and he said "No problem!"
"HTTP allows web site authors to put multiple versions of the same
information under a single URL. Transparent content negotiation is
an extensible negotiation mechanism, layered on top of HTTP, for
automatically selecting the best version when the URL is accessed.
This enables the smooth deployment of new web data formats and markup
tags."