The Beastie Boys said, “You gotta fight for your right to party”. In this case, Internet companies are duking it out to fight for their right to be called the number one Internet destination. MySpace had a big coup this week when Hitwise reported that MySpace had taken the number one spot from Yahoo as the most visited U.S. destination on the web. This was a big win, not just for MySpace, but for social networking and web 2.0 in general.

Now the controversy starts. According to Reuters:

Yahoo issued a statement saying that: “The Yahoo network is made up of many domains and it is not accurate to compare MySpace.com to just Yahoo’s (e-mail site).”

In the United States, Yahoo said it attracts 129 million unique visitors per month, which represents 74 percent of the online population in the world’s biggest Internet market. By contrast, MySpace reaches 30 percent of the online audience, with 52 million unique visitors, according to Yahoo.

Hitwise does not provide figures for the number of unique visitors to a site. (Reuters)

The big question: Who is right?

Mark Twain popularized the now-famous Benjamin Disraeli quote: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Hitwise measures based on a single site; therefore, MySpace has more visitors than any of Yahoo’s single sites. On the flip side, if you combined all of Yahoo’s web properties, they probably have more visitors than MySpace.

The answer: Both, and it depends on how you measure it.

When we think of web 2.0, many of us naturally associate it with consumers rather than corporations. With examples like MySpace, Digg, Flickr, Wikipedia / wikis, blogging, and others, the value to the consumer is clear; however, the value of web 2.0 can be extended to the enterprise. In another blog entry, I described web 2.0 as “the collaborative, community oriented web where collective intelligence is harnessed and content is created the many rather than the few.” Think about the power of this idea relative to harnessing the collective intelligence of the people within an enterprise and of those people outside of your company who use or care about your products.

More details on web 2.0 in the enterprise, including some quotes from Gartner, can be found on my Intel Trends in Web 2.0 blog.

Sid Yadav posted an interesting entry about the 33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era. He categorizes each site by what type of person it is “best for”, and I was struck by how 14 of his general social networking sites were best for teens, young adults, or college / university students while only 2 were best for adults / middle-aged. My limited experience with MySpace is leading me to the same conclusion. I recently began actively playing with MySpace to better understand all of the buzz (feel free to add me as a friend if you happen to use it and want to help me learn more about using it!)

In one word, this experience is telling me that I am “old”. I typically do not think of 35 as over the hill; however, in MySpace terms, I am positively ancient. The power of MySpace (and I suspect this to be true for similar sites) is the ability to keep in constant touch with all of your friends, which are also all on MySpace. So far, I have managed to add as friends the only three people under 30 that I know along with two other people closer to my own age who also happen to be on MySpace. These three people in their mid-20s have between 54 and 76 friends each with lots of comments left by these friends talking about evenings out, parties, getting together, harassments about phone calls not returned, happy holiday wishes and pictures of nights on the town. I guess it is a little like a mini online party every day with all of your friends.

My fellow old folks, do not despair … according to Yadav, we shine in the niche social networking site category (with “old” being defined as over 30 in this case). The readers of this blog, mostly business types, are probably more familiar with LinkedIn than with MySpace, myself included. However, there are niche social networking sites for everything from dog / cat / fuzzy pet owners to car / film / book / music lovers to shoppers to mommies. We just have to find our niche.

I have to admit that I tend to hang with the LinkedIn crowd more that the MySpace crowd; however, I am making an effort to better understand social networking from the MySpace perspective. Rather than reading yet another article or blog about MySpace, I have decided to just jump in with both feet and use it a bit. I created a profile ages ago, but have not actually used it for anything.

This is a learning experience for me, but if I have any regular readers using MySpace, please feel free to add me as a friend and help me better understand this more social form of online networking. You can find me here.

In addition to this blog, I have started a new blog devoted to Trends in Web 2.0. Here is the difference between the two:

• Trends in Web 2.0: this blog falls under the scope of what I do for a living (a corporate blog) and will be focused only on web 2.0. I plan to blog 2-3 times a week.

• Open Culture: my personal (non-work) blog with a broader focus on open communities where I will try to continue to blog 5-7 times a week. My plan is to not let the Trends in Web 2.0 blog interfere with my blogging activities here.

Please take a look at the new blog and use the comments to let me know what you think!

Historically, Oracle has a track record for figuring out what it wants to do and aggressively doing whatever it takes to make it happen. The PeopleSoft / Siebel acquisitions come to mind as a couple of recent examples. Most recently, Ellison told journalists that Oracle plans to go after Red Hat to provide support for Red Hat Linux, which seems to be Red Hat’s primary source of revenue.

With the recent Red Hat acquisition of JBoss, Red Hat now competes more directly with Oracle. I would expect this acquisition to impact the relationship between the two companies with the relationship moving away from a synergistic relationship between operating system provider / application provider while moving toward a more competitive and adversarial relationship. Raven Zachary of The 451 Group believes that this could be an indicator of future open source announcements from Oracle in the future. Ellison is also a master at getting attention and a reaction from the press, and it remains to be seen how much of this is serious strategy vs. an attempt to gauge the reaction to a possible action for Oracle in the future.

Open source is not the only area that has Oracle’s attention. The focus on the ERP market and specifically on SAP as a primary competitor is pushing Oracle toward an aggressive vertical strategy (banking, government, oil and gas, etc.) When “Asked if he is looking at more acquisitions to strengthen those vertical industry sectors and Ellison is emphatic: ‘Absolutely. We’re not done by a long shot.’” (ITP).

It will be fascinating to watch where Oracle goes next.

Washington Post writer Frank Ahrens chronicles the evolution of the Wikipedia entry on Kenneth Lay as the details about his death became known. He claims that it uncovered the key weakness of Wikipedia, which prevents it from being a credible source of information.

A few gems from his article include:

Unlike, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia has no formal peer review for its articles. They may be written by experts or insane crazy people. Or worse, insane crazy people with an agenda.

…

But here’s the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you’re getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it’s fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.

Some Wikipedia articles contain warnings that concerns have been raised over accuracy. But that’s not the same as offering fact-checked data.

I’m a fan of Wikipedia and Wiki notions, such as “citizen journalism.” I just want them to be better. (Washington Post)

I think that Ahrens misses the point. He cites the fact that someone edited Kenneth Lay’s Wikipedia entry to say that the cause of death was an apparent suicide, and it went through several iterations before being corrected to read that the cause of death was not yet determined. The time it took to correct the erroneous entry? Three minutes. Yes, three long minutes. To me, this shows that the Wikipedia community is doing its job, and it demonstrates the power of having an active community. The Kenneth Lay entry went through a few more iterations including some speculation that the Enron trial may have caused the heart attack; however, these were also corrected quickly.

The benefit of having an active and vibrant community comes through in times like what was described by Ahrens. There is a tremendous power that can be harnessed when you open something up to a community. Rather than hiring a few experts to write content, you can harness the power of many contributors around the world. The difference with Wikipedia is that instead of a formal peer review, you have many experts acting informally as peer reviewers. While mistakes like in the Kenneth Lay entry will creep into Wikipedia, the community acting as peer reviewers will see and correct the mistakes. As the content is evaluated and analyzed by the community, it improves in quality and self-corrects quickly. Eric Raymond referred to this concept as “Linus’s Law” stating that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” (Eric Raymond). This means that as more and more people look at the content, mistakes will be found and corrected resulting in an end product with high quality. This is the premise behind Wikipedia. The wiki technology used by Wikipedia makes it easy for anyone to contribute, and articles are written collaboratively while changes are recorded making it easy to correct inaccuracies and track the changes to any article over time. The idea is that as more and more people use Wikipedia, users will make corrections and contribute content to improve Wikipedia.

Like Ahrens, I am also a fan of citizen journalism and community content; however, these need to be evaluated on their own merits, not criticized just because they do not conform to today’s rules of traditional journalism. We need to evolve our thinking to reflect the current reality rather than being stuck in the past.

I think that a trend is starting in the blogosphere (or this has been going on for years, and I just never noticed). Here’s the recipe:

• Take one high profile blogger

• Add a blog entry about how cool someone is and say that you want to hire them

• Wait to see if they bite on the offer

OK, so this is a bit tongue in cheek, but it is essentially what Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have done. Calacanis started by offering Amanda Congdon (formerly of Rocketboom) a job at AOL/Netscape with great pay, ownership rights to her videos, access to their new studio in LA for filming, and a travel budget to cover stories on the road. Scoble jumped into the fray by speculating on what it would take for him (at PodTech) to hire someone as amazing as Calacanis. I will be interested to see if others jump on this bandwagon.

I have a great job right now, but the next time I am looking for a new challenge, maybe I will just blog about it and wait for the offers to come rolling out of the blogosphere.

Looking at the headlines today on TechMeme, I was excited to see that Microsoft was embracing interoperability with ODF. This is a step in the right direction for Microsoft; however, I am becoming more skeptical as I look into the details. Rather than natively supporting ODF as just another of the many file formats already being supported by Microsoft Office, they have instead decided to support ODF using special ODF / Open XML translation tools being developed by a third party. On the plus side, they will be releasing the translation tools under an open source license.

Here is the snippet from the Microsoft press release that has me worried:

“By enabling this translator, we will make both choice and interoperability a more practical option for our customers,” said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft. “We believe that Open XML meets the needs of millions of organizations for a new approach to file formats, so we are sharing it with the industry by submitting it, with others, to become a worldwide standard. Yet it is very important that customers have the freedom to choose from a range of technologies to meet their diverse needs.”

Open XML and ODF were designed to meet very different customer requirements. By developing the bidirectional translation tools through an open source project, the technical decisions and tradeoffs necessary will be transparent to everyone — Open XML and ODF advocates alike. The Open XML formats are unique in their compatibility and fidelity to billions of Office documents, helping protect customers’ intellectual investments. Open XML formats are also distinguished by their approach to accessibility support for disabled workers, file performance and flexibility to empower organizations to access and integrate their own XML data with the documents they use every day. In contrast, ODF focuses on more limited requirements, is architected very differently and is now under review in OASIS subcommittees to fill key gaps such as spreadsheet formulas, macro support and support for accessibility options. As a result, certain compromises and customer disclosures will be a necessary part of translating between the two formats. (Microsoft)

Maybe I am a bit skeptical, but this seems to imply that the translation tools are designed to show us how the Open XML format is better than ODF. This does not give me warm fuzzy feelings about Microsoft’s intent to support ODF. Others are also a bit skeptical.

If you are interested in trying it out, you can find the translator on SourceForge.

In a world where nearly everything can be done electronically, does it really matter where you are located? Online communities have been the primary mechanism for doing business in open source software since the very beginning with contributors spread across the globe, but we have recently been seeing many open source companies relocating to Silicon Valley. One of the most recent examples is Compiere’s move from the Portland area (where I live) to Menlo Park, CA. Matt Asay is particularly concerned with the relocation of so many European open source firms to Silicon Valley.

In a virtual, or flat world, we should not need to be co-located with other vendors, venture capital firms, or other partners. This is especially true for open source firms due to the virtual nature of doing business in open source. Dana Blankenhorn, who refers to Matt as “Mark” Asay in his ZDNet Blog, does not agree. I think this is a typical case of what I think of as “old fogy syndrome” where “old” refers to a style of thinking rather than chronological age. People who think this way tend to say things like … “we tried that 15 years ago; it didn’t work then, and it won’t work now” or “we’ve been doing it this way for 10 years so why change it now”. One of Dana’s primary arguments is that venture capital investments and mergers are more likely with close physical proximity adding that “if Silicon Valley were not home to so many well-funded VCs, how would America be doing in open source?” (ZDNet). Interesting. First, I do not think of open source as an American phenomenon. Second, the reality is that VCs are expanding into other geographies. Sequoia Capital, a leading investor in technology companies, has locations in California, China, Israel, and India. The business and information technology world is evolving at a rapid pace as the world continues to flatten. As location matters less and less, fewer companies will need to relocate to follow the investment dollars.

I agree with Matt. Open source companies should not be compelled to relocate. The diversity that comes with different locations, cultures, and ideas should not be replaced by a monolithic Silicon Valley environment where people all start to think and act alike.

UPDATE 7/7/06: Big OOPS. I accidentally attributed a link to Dana Gardner, instead of Dana Blankenhorn (after I made fun of Blankenhorn for getting Matt Asay’s name wrong in his post). Apologies to Dana Gardner. How embarrassing!