a post from Juxtaprose. . .

I’ve been IMing and emailing people about David Silver’s summary of his lecture on The Power of Web 2.0. It’s a concise and balanced description and critique of web 2.0.

I actually like the basic definition of web 2.0 that David gives—probably the best definition of web 2.0 that I’ve seen:

web 2.0 sites are less about lectures (broadcast) and more about conversation (participation)

I like how the definition offers a clean, categorical contrast between lectures / broadcast and conversations / participation. Unlike almost all other web 2.0 definitions, one could probably use David’s definition to graph a progression from web 1.0 to web 2.0 across some websites.

David does critique a number of things about the veracity of web 2.0, e.g., are web 2.0 sites actually more about conversation than earlier sites? I’ve also critiqued this—particularly the (mis)use of the word “conversation,” in my post on The web is a conversational medium of connections. (David also left a good comment on that post.)

David’s definition does make me think of something that seems useful to say, but that’s a bit more independent of the web 2.0 hype:

Publishing on the web used to be more about publishing (because that’s what people knew), but it’s becoming more and more about the the web.

And, as I suggested in my post on Web. verb, as in, to Web. . ., more and more, we realize we’re not so much doing anything on the web—actually, we are doing the web. We web!