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I always enjoy Dilbert, but this one is especially funny: Dilbert on Web 2.0.

Catchy name for a party, isn’t it

When I helped start the Yahoo Developer Network, part of my job was to go around to all the product teams inside Yahoo and convince them that it would be good for their business to open up free web APIs. The response among technical folks was pretty universally enthusiastic. It’s just one of those ideas that make great sense to an engineer. Among business folks, the response was more mixed. They would bring up a pretty predictable series of concerns. Will it cannibalize my business? How will we prevent abuse? Do we have to go first? And the unspoken concern - how will this affect my job?

Another issue that came up - one that caught me by surprise - is that some people thought open APIs and open source were somehow the same thing. As in “if we open an API does that mean we will open source our software?”. Umm, no. Both open source and open APIs have to do with technology and both have the word “open” in them, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Yet it kept coming up. For example, when Yahoo announced an open API for Yahoo Mail someone wrote a big article on how Yahoo was open sourcing Yahoo Mail (the story has since vanished, I could only find this Digg link to it).

To help clarify open source vs. open APIs, here’s a quick overview of each:

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Musicians are starting to pull content off of MySpace because MySpace's terms of use claim ownership of anything you put on their service:

Musicians' rights: Lost in MySpace?

Many people don’t like the term user generated content. It’s because it focuses on content, not people. And people are what matters most on the new web. I mentioned this to Tony Conrad a while back, and yesterday I noticed that he’s using the term People Media instead of user generated content. I asked him why and he said it just seemed to make sense to him. I agree. I like it. Mainstream Media. People Media.

In case you haven't already, you should check out Sphere. It's a great new blog search engine which I helped get started last year and which, more importantly, will help you discover great blogs.

Everyone but Wall Street seems to be excited about the “new web”:

• Consumers: excited: 200,000 new MySpace users every day
• VCs: excited:pre-revenue web 2.0 startups are raising $5-10MM
• Press: excited: Business Week, Business 2.0, DesignTechnica, lots more
• Wall Street: not excited: Google drops 7% (again) overnight