Nosce te ipsum

Get those business models ready! (snore...)

Web 2.0, right, wrong or indifferent seems to stuck as a name for the collective evolution of our beloved Internet. It means so many things, depending on who you ask and in this piece, Tim O'Reilly explains what it all means from his perspective. Tim is a pretty astute guy and although I don't particularly agree with him on every point, this is a nice piece that you can use when trying to exaplin the whole Web 2.0 idea to your clients.

In my opinion, there is a general energy in the air & on the web as of late the really reminds me of 'the good old days' circia 1997 or so with lots of interesting technologies being developed and put to use in interesting ways. Refer to the article for a preview of some of these technologies, but the truth is, you are already using many of them in your daily web life even if you are not aware of it.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0 Web 2.0 DoubleClick --> Google AdSense Ofoto --> Flickr Akamai --> BitTorrent mp3.com --> Napster Britannica Online --> Wikipedia personal websites --> blogging evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB domain name speculation --> search engine optimization page views --> cost per click screen scraping --> web services publishing --> participation content management systems --> wikis directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy") stickiness --> syndication