What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly — Defining just what Web 2.0 means (the term was first coined at a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International, which also spawned the Web 2.0 Conference), still engenders much disagreement. Some decry it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, while others have accepted it as the new conventional wisdom. Tim O’Reilly attempts to clarify just what we meant by Web 2.0, digging into what it means to view the Web as a platform and which applications fall squarely under its purview, and which do not.
A very interesting article from Tim O’Reilly. “Web 2.0″ is nothing more than defining an era such as “The Agrarian Age”, “The Industrial Age”, or the “Information Age”. “Web 2.0″, as geeky as it sounds, is just the next evolution of the Internet as a platform for serving up a new generation of applications focusing on meta data and helping to build the Web of Participation - the original promise of the Internet going back to Arpanet. It’s always been about people participating, communicating, sharing, rather than people being passive observers, as is the case with typical “Web 1.0″ applications.
My advice for the average users of the Web, Entrepreneurs, and VCs, stop talking about Web 2.0. Forget about the cliche and the hype. Focus on using, building, and funding a new generation of Internet applications, respectively. Applications like del.icio.us, Shadows, Ning, and Flickr offer a way of users being able to consume, share, and communicate information with each other, rather than consuming data from large media companies.
