Monday, November 12, 2007

Speaking of buzz words...

What exactly does Wed 2.0 mean anyway?

I find it interesting that we add a slew of new tech words to the Oxford English dictionary every year, words that just slip into our everyday vocabulary without us really being conscious of when or how exactly we adopted them.

According to Wikipedia: "Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users."

I love that "wikis" is included in their formal definition. Also, considering origin, Web 2.0 is generally attributed to Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media in 2004 when the company held their first "Web 2.0 Conference". The conference also presented what they thought would be the major themes of Web 2.0 as follows:
And finally, a few other most recent tech-related additions to the OED, although none have made the cut yet in spellcheck:
  • Infobahn (noun)
  • technopreneur (noun)
  • tighty-whities (noun)
  • virtualize (verb)
  • undelete (verb)

4 comments:

Junghee said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Junghee said...

I meant to write:
Can you tell me the technical definition of "tighty-whities"? :)

Junghee said...

Ooh, I also found this word on O.E.D. new words for 2007:
zombie
n.
3. a computer controlled by a hacker without the owner's knowledge, which is made to send large quantities of data to a website, making it inaccessible to other users.

This is what the last speaker talked about. Don't make your computers into zombies!

Jay Orfield said...

Web 2.0 is a hot term right now. I hear it nearly everywhere I go. Until now, I didn't really know what it meant, though. I've got a feeling that a lot of others who are hearing it and even using it, don't know what it means either.

The web-based world moves so quickly and leaves behind many who are still scrambling to catch up on Web 1.something. Many are looking for the next facebook or Wikipedia, seemingly without acknowledging that a less cutting edge approach may reach the multitudes.

Many would be well served by positioning to best capture the attention of the "right" audience.