ft.com/techblog

There was a moment at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco today that perfectly encapsulated the culture clash that has been building between proponents of the technology and the corporate mainstream that is seeking to exploit it.

It came when Ross Levinsohn, head of Fox Interactive, was asked whether he would consider opening up the APIs on MySpace so that independent developers could write web services that draw on all the personal data locked up on MySpace’s servers. (Facebook has already done this.)

This is fast becoming something of an issue for the Web 2.0 crowd. Liberating the data would free up the raw material to power any number of new internet services. It would also hand control back to the "real" owners of the data, the customers. There are already business models being built around the idea that you should be able to share in any profits that an internet service makes from tapping into your personal information.

Mr Levinsohn’s response: "Great idea - it’s something we’ve been looking at and considering." He said this with about as much enthusiasm, though, as a turkey contemplating Thanksgiving.

But then, why should News Corp give away one of the key things that keeps the audience coming back for more? MySpace has been working to keep its users on its own services for longer, not hand them off to others. Having once served as an incubator for YouTube, for instance, it is now bent on building a video service that keeps MySpace users in the fold.

The argument for openess, of course, is that captive customers are becoming a thing of the past anyway. They will migrate to other services rather than stay for something that is second-best, so better to supply the underlying (open) platform that supports their internet activities rather than lose them entirely. It will be interesting to see how the old media crowd come to terms with that one.

Richard Waters, San Francisco

Jeff Bezos has been getting beaten up in the press again recently, but then what’s new? His latest misdemeanor is to have taken Amazon into web services. Other businesses can now rent data storage capacity or get a temporary shot of extra computer processing power by plugging into the infrastructure that Amazon built to support its own operations. This, though, is said to be straying from Amazon’s core. BusinessWeek took a shot at Bezos last week. Nick Carr has been blogging about it for a while.

Where’s the problem? Sure, it often makes sense for companies that develop useful technologies to run their own operations to spin them off as separate businesses. With Amazon, though, it’s about more than the software: it’s about renting spare capacity. Bezos made this point on stage at the Web 2.0 conference this morning. The biggest cost of running Amazon’s datacentres, he said, is not the power they consume, the hardware they are stuffed with or even the people employed in them: it is "a lack of utilisation." The same is true of the warehouses that Amazon has built to distribute its own products. If it can cover some of that overhead, why not? (And yes, it is now possible to rent fulfillment from Amazon - to ship products in bulk to its warehouses and let it handle the rest.)

Longer term, Bezos may indeed have to make a choice. He may simply not be able to serve three different types of customer: consumers, companies that sell to them and software developers. This, in essense, is the same question that Microsoft has faced for a long time. Companies are rarely good at doing all these things well. But for now, it makes sense for Bezos to push his new services business as hard as he can.

Richard Waters, San Francisco

Everything you wanted to know about the state of the blogosphere, plus a whole lot more you didn’t, is in this post from Dave Sifry at Technorati.

One notable fact: the global blog supply may still be soaring, but (give or take the odd spike) the number of actual posts seems to have levelled out. Does that mean even the bloggers are finally running out of things to say?

Richard Waters, San Francisco