I'd recommend you go with REST first - if you're using Java look at JAX-RS and the Jersey implementation. REST is much simpler and easy to interop in many languages.
As others have said in this thread, the problem with SOAP is its complexity when the other WS-* specifications come in and there are countless interop issues if you stray into the wrong parts of WSDL, XSDs, SOAP, WS-Addressing etc.
The best way to judge the REST v SOAP debate is look on the internet - pretty much all the big players in the web space, google, amazon, ebay, twitter et al - tend to use and prefer RESTful APIs over the SOAP ones.
The other nice approach to going with REST is that you can reuse lots of code and infratructure between a web application and a REST front end. e.g. rendering HTML versus XML versus JSON of your resources is normally pretty easy with frameworks like JAX-RS and implicit views - plus its easy to work with RESTful resources using a web browser
