Web 2.0 Awards Zeitgeist

Pretty good pass at defining Web 2.0, although perhaps lacking the social dimension:

[from Web 2.0 Awards Zeitgeist]

What is Web 2.0?

As with all things online, the Web 2.0 phenomenon is somewhat amorphous. Semantically, tacking a version number to the Web doesn’t make sense (and few agree on what it means) but practically, “Web 2.0” refers to a recent rebirth of sites that focus on user empowerment and open-source applications online. There is a loose set of criteria that bind these sites together and creates the synonymous language that web mavens like Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Emily Chang (eHub), John Battelle (BattelleMedia) and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Network) have adopted. In many ways, these elements can be thought of as the formative definition of Web 2.0:

• User generated and/or user influenced content
• Applications that use the Web (versus the desktop) as a platform, in innovative ways
• Similar visual design and shared functional languages
• Leveraging of popular trends, including blogging, social tagging, wikis, and peer-to-peer sharing
• Inclusion of emerging web technologies like RSS, AJAX, APIs (and accompanying mashups), Ruby on Rails and others
• Open source or sharable/editable frameworks in the form of user-oriented “create your own” APIs

Like many loosely defined, emergent fields, however, Web 2.0 is often said to be in the mind of the observer. Even some of the trendsetters and writers in the field use the phrase “I know it when I see it.” The above concepts represent only a rough framework and many sites that fall outside these ideals still rate the classification.

Not all of Web 2.0 is serious business, though. Many “Web 2.0 themed” sites are built just for fun and others are built entirely to satire Web 2.0 or the excitement about it. Take, for example, the Web 2.0 Validator, a tool that will tell you exactly how “Web 2.0-esque” your site is based on how much of the applicable technology it employs. There are Web 2.0 checklists, varying in degree from simple to complex, and even those that will tell you how to make your site “look” like a Web 2.0 application (Web 2.0 Design). If you think you want to give it a try, you can generate your own “VC friendly” Web 2.0 company name and product with the Web 2.0 Name Generator! There’s even Web 2.0 Bingo.