‘Web 2.0’ Has Arrived

A standing-room-only crowd of 800 entrepreneurs, executives, software developers, and journalists were in attendance on Wednesday, October 6, as O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly and former Industry Standard editor-in-chief John Battelle kicked off the second annual Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

At least in the two tech gurus’ minds, "Web 2.0" stands for the idea that the Internet is evolving from a collection of static pages into a vehicle for software services, especially those that foster self-publishing, participation, and collaboration. (See O’Reilly’s recent essay, ‘What is Web 2.0?’). User-centered Web phenomena such as blogging, community photo-sharing (exemplified by Flickr), collective editing (Wikipedia), and social bookmarking (Delicious), they argue, are disrupting traditional ideas about how software is built and how information is generated, shared, and distributed on the Internet.

With almost half a million Wikipedians contributing and editing articles, 90 million people running the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser, and 18.9 million people now publishing blogs (according to blog search engine Technorati), the case goes, it’s hard to dispute that users’ attention is gradually shifting away from the products of traditional publishers, media companies, and software makers.

By Wade Roush

Full Story: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/10/wo/wo_100705roush.asp?trk=nl