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Pew Internet Life’s new report Riding the Waves of “Web2.0″, another investigation into the meaning of the term, doesn’t contain a lot of surprises for readers of this blog, though they may find its conclusions controversial.

After explaining the origins and the perceived meaning of Web 2.0, the report argues that, “despite all of this commotion over collaboration, participation and emancipation from static information”, the things we do using web 2.0 applications are old hat. The report suggests that people have been uploading photos, writing personal web pages and discussing issues and products with other users for as long as the web has existed.

The closing paragraph sums this up nicely:

Whatever language we use to describe it, the beating heart of the internet has always been its ability to leverage our social connections. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster struck a powerful social chord at the right time with the right technology, but the actions they enable are nothing new.

It then goes on to say:

A trip to the Geocities homepage on the “Wayback Machine” circa December 19, 1996 (courtesy of The Internet Archive) yields this decidedly quaint statement from the company: “We have more than 200,000 individuals sharing their thoughts and passions with the world, and creating the most diverse and unique content on the Web.” Replace “200,000” with “100 million” and you could almost imagine this sentence appearing on the MySpace homepage.

So what we have now, as far as this analysis is concerned, is more people doing the same things. Why, then, are people talking about a Web 2.0 at all? To a lot of people, we shouldn’t be. They’d say there’s no revolution, only evolution.

I am sympathetic to this view, despite my obvious allegiances: I get the point. A couple of extra considerations may change the conclusions of the report, though.

Firstly, more people alters things in more ways than one. 200,000 vs 100mn users is not just a 50X difference in scale. 200,000 is the population of a small town. 100mn is the combined population of France and Spain. More than 60% of the adults in the UK have internet access; among children, the figure is nearly 100%. The Internet is now an enormous social and cultural force. Communicating with my mother via email and using a shared photo site would have been impossible until 2005, because she didn’t “see any point having a computer”. Now, every member of my family is online. What the country (and much of the world) sees, reads, believes, our culture and common experience, is directly affected by cyberspace in a way that simply wasn’t true as little as two years ago.

Social Media - the blogs and podcasts and social bookmarks and customer review sites - now has a power equivalent to the mainstream, with bloggers having the ability to shape the mainstream news agenda and to make or break the fortunes of companies. Would there ever have been millions of dollars spent on laptop battery recalls by Apple, Dell and others without the ability of social media to move pretty isolated incidents directly into the eye of public attention? Without digg and YouTube and thousands of bloggers pointing their fingers? I very much doubt it. The expectation of free-flowing information, self-publishing and participation in a conversation are very widespread, and is again, something that did not exist until a couple of years ago.

The databases and other resources we use and create on the Internet, from search to flickr pictures to wikis are the product of almost everyone, not a select group of geeks. Web 2.0 services often rely on the power of network effects, the idea that the power of the network is the square of the number of users. There would be no point to a social network like MySpace, for example, if none of your friends are on it. If all your friends are on it, then it becomes the hub of your internet activity. This also makes ‘wisdom of crowds’ applications like Wikipedia, eBay reputations and Google plausible and usable, since we now have the necessary diversity and volume of data to generated useful results.

Second, in addition to general public access - in the Western world at least - the quality of internet access has also improved in a way that is more than numerical. When I first joined CompuServe in the early nineties, my brand-new modem operated at 28.8kbps. Now I get speeds up to 8Mbps. That doesn’t mean I can just do the same thing a lot faster, though that’s also true, it means I can do completely different things. I can upload all my photos; I can watch movies in real time; I can use rich AJAX applications that continually refresh the data I’m viewing or creating; I can speak to people using VOIP; I can download the new content from a hundred websites to my feed reader in just a few seconds. The focus of where I do things is slowly but irreversibly changing from my desktop to my online services.

So more people and faster connections are certainly the foundations of Web 2.0. But it is reductionist to claim that’s just an increase in scale. What those two ingredients actually enable is the ’something different’ that we really mean by the term: social media, read/write web, the wisdom of crowds, web as platform, rich applications, and the power of data.