Dave Winer posted an interesting breakdown of how he defines the various Web 2.0 camps. He wrote something very similar in an internal email to the Web 2.0 Workgroup yesterday. It generated quite a discussion on the email list, and I’m glad he’s put it out on the open web.

I don’t fully agree with Dave, but as always he has an interesting and intelligent viewpoint that demands consideration.

He dislikes the Web 2.0 moniker because (my words) he believes it was born in sin and has been exploited by lots of people purely for their own gain. Ok - I don’t have an opinion on that because, frankly, I don’t know all of the facts. But I do know that I love what’s happening on the web right now and am perfectly happy calling it Web 2.0 - because we clearly had a period of a couple of years after the stock market crashed where innovation didn’t quite die, but certainly was mostly going on behind the scenes. The renaissance we are witnessing now is beautiful, and I for one am going to enjoy every single minute of it.

The discussion around Dave’s most recent post is building up at the Meme. My original post on the issue, where I jokingly call Dave and Richard MacManus traitors, is here.

I spoke on a panel called “Valley of Destiny or Valley of Doom” at the HBS Tech conference this morning. I was working on very little sleep and was a bit…tired after my party last night. That’s my excuse for straying a bit from the assigned topic of “outsourcing”.

The other panelists were Jack Harding, Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor. We tried to stay on topic, for a bit, but we were soon talking about whether or not Silicon Valley is, was and can remain the intellectual and technical capital of the world.

The audience chimed in, and there were heated comments. Dave told me at one point to “get a life”. The audience went quiet until they realized that Dave and I were both chuckling and Dan mentioned that we are good friends. I don’t think anyone realized that Dave and I are in a bit of a disagreement over my planned inclusion of advertising on TechCrunch as well (Dave published a podcast on this topic today before the panel). But as Dave says, he wouldn’t really be my friend if he didn’t tell me exactly what he thinks of my decisions, even when he disagrees.

Jeff Clavier has a great summary post here.

Dave Winer: A roadmap for my work on OPML reading lists for RSS.

we will release the aggregator under an open source license, the same one we use for the OPML Editor and for the Frontier kernel, so the community can have a go at it, and equally important, to serve as a test-bed for the implementation of OPML reading lists for RSS aggregators.

More on reading lists at TechCrunch.

I agree with Dave on this. And Robert. And Fred. And (partially) Richard. Companies, even big companies, especially big companies, need to open up their data without usage limits, or else they will make their services and themselves irrelevant.

At TechCrunch I give preference to companies that have distributed, as opposed to centralized, data. I really like companies that take other people’s/service’s data and do something more useful with it. And I give bonus points to companies that open up their data via APIs for the world to mash. Those companies are more likely to be written about, and more likely to have positive reviews. Now if a company has an API, but limits its usage, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone building a scalable service will rely on it. They’ll go elsewhere.

So, yeah, companies need to think about this, hard, when they are building their services. I understand the fear of losing your audience, but the only way to become and stay relevant is to give as much, or more, as you take from the web.

Dave Winer posted a new Coffee Notes podcast. Bits of tagcamp coolness in there. Even more politics - Dave wonders when Scooter will start spilling the beans and moving this whole mess up the ladder at the White House. Near the end, Dave mentions the Microsoft press meeting on Tuesday. I’ll be there, can’t wait to hear the news.