Tim O’Reilly’s essay defining the features of Web 2.0 is quite candid about the roots of the term. They were going to do a conference about all this new stuff that was happening on the internet, and they needed a name for it. This original definition is a lot more embracing than many subsequent ones. Indeed, according to this, Web 2.0 sites have been around for 5-6 years, surviving the dotcom crash of 2001. A reduction of this is that Web 2.0 = “the sort of site that does well and survives”. The later refinements of the definition – the web as platform, the wisdom of crowds, etc – are attempts to analyse what was originally quite a vague feeling.
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.
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June 28th, 2006 → 12:46 pm @ Ian Delaney
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