Andrew Cherry - The Cherry Pit ... 'cuz life's like a bowl of cherries?

Now that the buzzword 'Web 2.0' is on the tip of the senior exec's tongue when speaks about what's next for technology adoption, I was asked by a buddy in my program the other day to explain it what it is...... bit of a problem!!

He had just watched The Machine is Us/ing Us video, which in itself is an extraordinarily well done piece of work that does a great job to exposit the idea using the web itself as a method to visually present it. My buddy, an amazingly inquisitive fellow who is fanatical about self-learning through wikipedia, asked me why he should care about web 2.0. I begun explaining the wonderful buzzword by using the other sub buzzwords often associated with it: semantic web, atom/rss (not really a buzzword), portlets, user generated/moderated content, mashups, dynamic scritping etc... and then I stopped myself.

Surely this 'web 2.0' thing has to be more than just an evolution from the static HTML Web pages, that the other buzzwords seek to solve. I decided to take the leap and say, 'You know what, the web 2.0 buzzword is basically just a benign word that represents how far internet web tech has come, it should really be called Web 20 instead'.

What do I mean by this? Well, barring any splitting of hairs over how old the 'WWW' is (apologies to Tim Berners-Lee if the timing is exactly right), what I mean by 'Web 20' is basically that the Web has gone through 20 or so reinventions/iterations/evolutions over the past 15 or so years since it started. I went on to say that since web tech is going through so many incremental changes with new languages, platforms, protocols and software applications that you could argue that a new version comes out every 6-8 months or so (glad I didn't say 18 months, I wouldn't want to be so arrogant as to say something so fundamental as to liken it to Moore's Law ;) ).

So having said this, I guess it's not such a bad word after all, when it is being employed to educate the Luddites not entrenched in the development of new technologies that 'Technology on and about the web is continuously changing, and Web 2.0 (or web 20) signifies the culmination and aggregation of a number useful technologies that are evolving the way that everyone interacts with the web'.

And then I'll fall back on the The Machine is Us/ing Us video and call it a day.