Understanding Web 2.0

This afternoon, I was in a Skype discussion with an old friend in the UK and part of our conversation strayed into a discussion about Web 2.0. My friend thinks it's just meaningless marketing hype and similar to all the talk that we heard in the late 90s web services, sticky websites. You could even go back a bit further into the mid 90s when we heard about the video on demand and the networked computer. If you were around in those days, you may remember Oracle proclaiming that this was the Web 2.0 Meme Map. This type of illustrative description isn't really helpful to cynics like my friend who say they've seen it all before (and who said, incidentally, that the image helped confirm his negative opinion about Web 2.0). I don't like it much either, as it is very similar to such diagrams in the 90s - they weren't called "meme maps" in those days - that hyped how e-commerce (for instance) was what you just had to be in. So is Web 2.0 just a right brain individual like me. This I can explain. How about you? And by the way, here's a neat Reader Comments... Neville Hobson is the author of the popular Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: