Paul Graham recently published an insightful article on Web 2.0 titled, appropriately enough, Web 2.0. A highly recommended reading.

His description of the scene from the first Web 2.0 conference is amusing:

After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right?

Well, no. There were about 7. Even Tim O’Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn’t even parse it at first. I saw him walk by and said to one of the O’Reilly people “that guy looks just like Tim.”

“Oh, that’s Tim. He bought a suit.”

There are more clever articles in Paul’s collection of essays, among them is What Business Can Learn from Open Source. The premise here is that if people work on projects they like and are passionate about, working hours and office space don’t matter.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.

The secret sauce of open source, according to Paul, is that even if its contributors work for free and in their spare time, they are more productive because they are passionate. And they don’t have meetings, which are “like an opiate with a network effect”.

The open source essay was derived from a talk at OSCON 2005, which can be downloaded as a podcast from IT Conversations.

In a recent post on his blog, Microsoft’s CBO Richard Scoble contends that the delay of Windows Vista is in part due to the extreme complexity of the software. He points out that networking, security, video, imaging, UI, etc. must all be in place before the new operating system ships and if one link in the chain isn’t ready, everything is delayed.

News.com recently ran an interesting analysis of the problem in an article titled Windows is so slow, but why? Along with Scoble’s point about complexity, News.com mentions Microsoft’s bundling strategy and backward compatibility as part of the problem/challenge.

The bundling strategy is an interesting element of this. Integrating software into the most popular operating system on earth has served Microsoft well from a commercial perspective but it might be slowing them down technically.

It must also be a bit of a pain for any MS development team to learn that a commercial decision has been made to integrate their product into Windows. It’s like landing your fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, only to learn that your aircraft will be integrated into the ship and your elite crew of two will become a crew of thousands.

A few weeks back we started tracking the blogosphere buzz on Last.fm and Pandora, two music recommendation sites. Now we’ve added them to our Trend Tracker page for all to enjoy!

In “Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders” Steve Krause posts a detailed comparison of the two and contends that Pandora has a greater potential. According to Steve, Pandora can more easily implement Last.fm features than the other way around.

We’ve been very impressed users of Last.fm and wouldn’t be surprised if they come out on top, if only because their site is beautiful, usable and has a sizable and visible community. Also, we use Last.fm’s features for artist discovery more than the streaming personalized radio station that seems to be the main focus of Pandora.

Anyway, check out the Trend Tracker and see a daily update on which site is getting more coverage in the blogosphere.

An article in this week’s print edition of the Economist, Searching for the invisible man, discusses entrepreneurship from the viewpoint of economics. The article focuses on William Baumol and his views on innovation when conducted within large companies with an allocated annual budget on one hand and “wildcat” entrepreneurs on the other. (The image is by Baumol and appears along with others on his homepage.)

Dr. Baumol contends that “among the (rare) innovations that can be considered to be radical, a disproportionate share is provided by independent innovators and their affiliated entrepreneurs”. Established players however, mostly provide “slightly better mousetraps”, i.e. incremental improvements.

But why would any sane person want to become an entrepreneur at all, given the huge risks and relatively low success rate? One of the main qualifications seems to be “a touch of madness”.

The Economist links to this year’s annual meeting of the American Economics Association, where three sessions on entrepreneurship were held in Baumol’s name. A passage in one of the articles there, by Carl J. Schramm, is amusing:

in addition to being a species that is apparently hard to see and difficult to exterminate, [entrepreneurs] play a central role in the undisputed objective of our managed economy, namely, growth.

So, entrepreneurs are the worms (or snails even) in the undergrowth of the economy. Invisible in economic theory, but vital for growth.

YouTube is a service that launched in early 2005 and allows users to upload and share videos, much like Flickr.com does for photos.

It was covered by Techcrunch in August 2005 and subsequently Slashdotted.

We have only recently become aware of the service and since Techcrunch predicts that YouTube will get acquired and since the same happened for Flickr in 2005, we thought that tracking the two on the Trend Tracker might be interesting.

How much buzz will YouTube have generated before and if it gets acquired?