As I mentioned in another post, I have built a library of go to resources when talking to clients about various topics. Another of these popped up recently when asked to define Web 2.0. There is a whole lot of information and misinformation out there in terms of what are the real characteristics of Web 2.0 (I have seen early articles on Web 3.0 but that is another topic entirely!). At its core, I look at Web 2.0 in a few ways that makes it different from the preceding reality:
- It’s about a platform (often more distributed), not a website (destination).
- It’s about participation, not publishing.
- It’s about web services, not web software.
There is a lot of thinking out there on this topic, but one of the first to dig into the subject was O’Reilly, see their exploration of the topic here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1