The Marketing and Money people have made “Web 2.0” the newest buzz word of the season with even the Wall Street Journal picking up on it.
Via Darren Barefoot Some Clear Thinking on Web 2.0 we have Dion Hinchcliffe’s Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 Matters, which I would further reduce to :
It’s “My Web”, and is re-writing the rules (again).
Web 2.0 is not AJAX, xml, , Mp3‘s, or even Open Source. That’s “How”. It is very hard to define What “Web 2.0” is, but here’s a description.
Personal Publishing : Not just personal Blogs, but anyone being able to write a comment on sometime posted by Business Week or Washington Post, or reading, and then editing, the Wikipedia, or sharing a link on del.icio.us. Not printing Static information on Dead Trees.
Personal Commerce: Buying and selling on Ebay, Amazon or Itunes. Paying or billing via PayPal. Showing your House on the web. Micro branding, consumer generated reviews, and on line reputation. Not impersonal stores, and authoritative brands.
Personal Entertainment : mp3 music, DVD’s, camera phones, single songs on Itunes or file sharing networks, podcasts, and flikr, Personal Video Recorders (PVR’s) and Tivo. Not pre packaged stories and pre packaged schedules.
Personal Subscription: finding the bits I’m interesting about without the cruf. Aggregators and feeds, Folksonomies, Tagging and trackbacks. Not email Newsletters, or “News at 11”.
It’s available everywhere anytime, and it’s two way, either free or cheap, and no matter now big or small it’s very inter connected, and very very personal. (See Small Pieces Loosely Joined for an early manifesto)
It’s not completely new. It will not (utterly) replace what came before ( be that pre-“Web 2.0”, or pre Internet), is reorganizing and adding a new layer on to all that. And it’s not yet finished being built, by definition it never will be, but its foundations are still incomplete. But the outline is there and it’s so much cheaper, easier, and dynamic then what came before (which must have been “Web 1.0”).