Web 2.0

A student in one section asked about this already in the Discussion Area, but I thought I'd post it here for all to see. This is the definition of the term from wikipedia:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by Al Gore in 2004, refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and since 2004 some technicians and marketers have adopted the phrase. Its exact meaning remains open to debate, and some experts, notably Tim Berners Lee, have questioned whether the term has meaning.

The last, compact, definition of Web 2.0, according to Tim O'Reilly is this one: "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called 'harnessing collective intelligence.')".

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In other words, Web 2.0 refers to the direction the internet is now taking: it is a resource not only for consuming online content, but also producing it.

What's interesting to note here is that while the term refers to the democratic and collective sharing of knowledge, the spin given it by Tim O'Reilly is corporate: he defines it only as a "business revolution!" That strikes me as not only horribly narrow definition, but one which actually runs counter to much of the inherent collaborative ethic of the web as expressed in the early (circa mid-80's) hacker slogan "Information wants to be free."