Web 2.0 means nothing. Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web based communities and hosted services — such as social networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O'Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted. Given the lack of set standards as to what "Web 2.0" actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean radically different things to different people. Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 already featured on networked systems well before the term "Web 2.0" emerged. Conversely, when a website is proclaimed "Web 2.0" for the use of some trivial feature (such as blogs or gradient-boxes) observers may generally consider it more an attempt at promotion than an actual endorsement of the ideas behind Web 2.0. "Web 2.0" in such circumstances has sometimes sunk simply to the status of a marketing buzzword, like "synergy," that can mean whatever a salesperson wants it to mean, with little connection to most of the worthy but (currently) unrelated ideas originally brought together under the "Web 2.0" banner. |