The concept of “Web 2.0” began with a
conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive
International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that
far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with
exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising
regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse
seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com
collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a
call to action such as “Web 2.0” might make sense? We agreed that it
did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
In the year and a
half since, the term “Web 2.0” has clearly taken hold, with more than
9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of
disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying
it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the
new conventional wisdom.
This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.
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What Is Web 2.0 |
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