The New Edition

Like a lot of trendy tech-related expressions, Web 2.0 is thrown around pretty loosely. Depending on the speaker, the term describes:

• The "second generation" of Internet-based services, emphasizing online collaboration and sharing among users.

• How Web sites have transformed from static information repositories to interlinked, shape-shifting sources of content and functions.

• The true democratization of the Web, in which users control how content is created and distributed.

It’s a marketing buzzword denoting a phase in the gradual march of Web progress. In truth, Web 2.0 is all of these things and more.

The Next Big Thing

Web 2.0 entails a complex and evolving set of technologies that defies easy categorization. But the common threads in its various iterations are an increased level of participation by the user and an enhanced level of sophistication in the applications used to run it.

To some, Web 2.0 describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications and services over the Internet. The textbook example of this is the “mash-up”—for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

To others—including Sebastopol, California–based tech book publisher O’Reilly Media, which coined the phrase three years ago—Web 2.0 includes a broader scope of second-generation Web-based services. Under Web 2.0, e-mailed news articles give way to really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, which are summaries of Web content pulled from multiple sites and aggregated into lists; Britannica Online gives way to Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia with articles written by the users; Kodak’s online photography store, Ofoto, gives way to Flickr, an online photo-sharing application; and personal Web pages give way to blogs. And apart from the growing bandwidth and storage capacity that greases the skids for Web innovation, the common thread in each of those transitions is a greater degree of control and access—and sometimes authorship—on the part of the end-user.

“As a term, Web 2.0 isn’t really specific,” says Nancy Lyons, president of Minneapolis-based Web and applications developer Clock-work Active Media Systems. “But you’d have to say it more describes the latest generation of Web sites and technologies that facilitate user-generated content, online communities, and an optimized user experience.”