Okay, so I’ve heard the term “Web 2.0″ several times… and I’ve heard about blogs, about MySpace.com, about how Google works, and all that – but never quite connected what they had to do with each other until last week.
I was at Interop in New York, when I stumbled in on a presentation being given by the Editor-in-Chief of the Web 2.0 Journal, Dion Hinchcliffe on Web 2.0 entitled Applying Web 2.0: Early Notes from the Field.
The speaker quoted Tim O’Reilly in his presentation giving the short definition of Web 2.0: “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” A network effect creates value by having a better product the more people that use it. He gave examples such as MySpace, YouTube, Digg, and eBay where content is created by users, as well as a search engine like Google or it’s gmail that gets smarter as people use it.
I hope to blog more about this in the future, but until then, here’s a side-bar I ran across in the most recent edition of Information Week entitled “The Skinny on Web 2.0″.