Defining exactly what Web 2.0 means is still an ongoing conversation. Tim O'Reilly attempts to clarify Web 2.0, digging into what it means to view the Web as a platform, and which applications fall squarely under its purview and which do not. The concept of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having crashed, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as Web 2.0 might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born. In the year and a half since, the term Web 2.0 has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as Web 1.0 and another as Web 2.0? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) ++++ http://oreilly.com/ +++++++