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:
- the web as a platform
- data as a driving force
- network effects created by an architecture of participation
- innovation in the assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of "open source" development)
- lightweight business models enabled by syndication of content and of service
- an end to the software-adoption cycle (the so-called "perpetual beta")
- software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the "Long Tail"
- ease of picking-up by early adopters
- Infobahn (noun)
- technopreneur (noun)
- tighty-whities (noun)
- virtualize (verb)
- undelete (verb)
