I was never sure what the heck Web 2.0 was anyway. Always thought is was some kind of buzzword that nerds use.

Welcome to the internet...unfortunately or fortunately it will never stop evolving, quite honestly sometimes I wish it would just stop for a day so that I can catch my bearings.

Web 2.0 was built around the open source/social platform and it was created by no single person but by millions of people who all shared the same ideas of how they would like the internet to work. Basically the internet became functional for many regular joes to submit content. Watch for the corporations to try to take that power back.

And as corporations do try to take that power, the 'people' are revolting: http://www.videosift.com/video/iHate-Innovative-Commenting-software
http://www.videosift.com/video/New-Media-Douchebags-in-Plain-English

Web 1.0 : People publish whatever they want on space they rent, other people read it.

Web 2.0 : People publish whatever they want (within the terms of use) for free (provided they license their contribution indefinitely and provide an email address) on a huge corporate site surrounded by advertising, and then other people come along and say "FIRST!" and "LAME!" and "ILLUMINATI NWO OMFG!" and "VI@GRA SIDENAF1L MEDS CANADA" and "http://girls.ru" and "TX 4 ADD!"



btw, some people have been writing about the misguidedness of Web 2.0 since the start... http://theregister.com/ particularly Andrew Orlowski.

oh but this is a very nice portrait of the VC guys:
This doesn’t surprise me. I know of a few notable exceptions, but many of the folks from the venture capital firms I’ve come in contact with over the years seem separated by light-years from the bleeding edge of tech culture. I remember when I was working on one of my old startups back in the early days of podcasting, and having to explain time and time again first the concept of time-shifting, then the concept of RSS, and then the concept of podcasting, and then on top of that what made my solution unique in the very narrow field of four or five people making money from podcasting at the time. It floored me that I had to spell out in such kindergarten language what I did to folks who supposedly invested in technology for a living! My personal experience tells me that a lot of VC folks just read the headlines of the tech blogs, and that’s about it.

I always felt that web 2.0 meant an evolution in websites that made them easier to use, looked slicker and meant you could do useful work online.

The long-standing problem is this glut of web 2.0 apps that have come out all with similar shiny logos and silly names like gluba, stikrr etc. They clearly aren't going to be in it for the long haul unless they have nailed something absolutely superbly.
I use a few productivity-orientated sites that have real value to me and I count Gmail among them. Google sites apart, any business that doesn't charge for their service is probably without anything of real value.

web2.0, afaik, simply means "sites with user-generated content, using ajax".
maybe I'm wrong here.

web 2.0 is undefined, it's a freaking buzzword from california ffs, those people don't need definition (or profit)
mostly it was a way for airheads to get funding from gullible VCs. "bubble 2.0" was the best concise critique i found.

RIP Web 2.0, we won't miss you.

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins wrote a follow up article to this one. It concerns Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. It appeared on Mashable last night.

I've started another thread to handle that discussion:
Blogging Is Dead; Long Live Blogging

Mashable posts daily a dizzying number of articles that chronicle the changes happening now on the Internet. It regularly provides lists of resource sites for different web activities.