Hmmm. More and more of the mainstream Web 1.0 voices (yes they are, and if they don't like it, tough) are lining up against the Web 2.0 moniker. Joel Spolsky is just one of the newest ones:

[from Joel on Software

The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.

[...]

Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless "Web 1.0" idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, "They just don't get it!"

I'll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term "Web 2.0" on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You're welcome.

Very interesting.

So, this reminds me of a great session (I only attended two, and they were both great) at Ad:tech this week. My old friend Charlie Buchwlater of Nielsen was chairing, and he had three fabulous panelists: Jorian Clarke, CEO, SpectraCom; Kathleen Gasperini, SVP and Co-Founder, Label Networks; and Mary Meehan, EVP and Co-Founder, Iconoculture. The session was The Internet According to Kids and the 21st Century Woman. The session was intended to focus on the thinking of interesting groups: the young (my thrust, here) and various sorts of women, segmented by age and identity.

One observation that struck me, and which is relevant to this Web 2.0 antihype, is that young people are not stuck in a long historical perspective. They are inventing what they do, what their interests are, and what they think is important. They do not listen when older people explain away their style choices as stupid or unbecoming. They listen to themselves, and to others who authentically seem interested in the process involved.

I predict that people like Joel, who intentionally distance themselves from a bottom-up movement like Web 2.0 because it is fuzzy and incomplete, are in fact labeling themselves as out of touch with the new segment for whom such terms make sense, if only as a means of self-identity. The fact that they don't make sense to other, older people and outsiders is part of the appeal. It worries me that Joel sounds like a troll here, like PC Magazine's Dvorak, howling at whatever newfangled stuff is coming down the pike. The message from curmudgeons like that is that everything important has already been invented, catalogued, and understood.

Other people that I admire, like David Weinberger, have trouble with the Web 2.0 moniker too. David seems to say that many of the characteristics attributed to Web 2.0 are in fact things that have been operational in the Web all along, and therefore the term may be superfluous.

I maintain that -- from the viewpoint of those involved in Web 2.0, the visionaries pushing it at the nuts-and-bolts level -- the differences are stark. On the other hand, Web 2.0 builds on Web 1.0, it doesn't replace Web 1.0. Just like the mammalian brain didn't leap into existence all by itself: it incorporates the reptile brain, and extends it. And the earliest versions of the mammalian brain looks amazingly like reptile brains: but we were on the road to something truly different.

People who don't get the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 aren't idiots, but they certainly aren't out there creating and promoting Web 2.0 apps and concepts: they are commenting, looking in from afar, and reading and repeating the comments of other uninvolved, or actively hostile, watchers. I would rather talk to the people doing it, rather than those saying its just the same old junk recycled, and focusing on the term instead of the spirit of what is happening out there. And I am sure that others close to the Web 2.0 vanguard will do the same.