It’s hard to count the number of times I’ve been asked to explain the buzzword of the year “web 2.0“. I finally found an explanaition of the phenomena that makes more sense (to me). Ajit Jaokar took Tim O’Reilly’s principles of Web 2.0 and changed the order a little. I’ve found O’Reilly’s explanation complete but unweildy when trying to boil down this “web 2.0″ thing down to a simple couple sentences. Jaokar’s readjustment focusses our attention on outcome, not implementation and that makes all the difference in the world. So the next time Robin asks “What is this web 2.0 buzz about?” the answer could be as easy as “It’s about harnessing collective intelligence”.
source: O’Reilly Radar
USENET? Academia? Search engines? Wouldn’t those all be considered Web 2.0 with that explaination?
Obviously I’m not high on the term. It just seems like the natural evolution of what came before it. It’s always felt to me like a solution looking for a problem.
Comment by Brent Gustafson — April 19, 2006 @ 12:27 pm
I know you don’t like the term and as a term i don’t particularly like it either, I’ve always prefered Social Filtering, or Collaborative Media, or really anything that has language with inherent meaning. Especially because “web 2.0″ is a technical sounding term people expect it to be precise, but it’s not, in a lot of ways it reminds me of the whole confusion caused by the “old” DHTML term.
To be perfectly fair and balanced I should also mention that wikipedia entry I listed above has an entire section dedicated to criticism of “web 2.o” including quotes like this.
“Skeptics argue that the term is little more than a buzzword, or that it means whatever its proponents want it to mean in order to convince their customers, investors and the media that they are creating something fundamentally new, rather than continuing to develop and use well-established technologies”
All that said, that is the term that caught on and thats what a lot of writing is about so that’s what people are trying to make sense of.
Comment by eric — April 19, 2006 @ 1:19 pm