Seriously, when the bottom fell out of the "internet boom" and companies were no longer throwing piles of money at anyone who could register a domain name (it was more about having an internet "presence" than having an actual functioning business model back in those days), Silicon Valley was desperate for a way to fill their coffers once again ... So, if the "first" version of the Internet could no longer make these people money, it only made sense to try and convince people that a "new" version of the Internet had suddenly sprang up in its place ("No no no, that was Web 1.0 that lost all your money! Now we're using Web 2.0!")
Now, it's not that the Web hasn't changed over the years (that certainly is not the case), but - to me - there hasn't been that fundamental paradigm shift big enough to justify claiming that we are in a whole new era ... In my opion, referring to things like blogs and wikis as "Web 2.0" is (at best) redundant, because these tools - even if the technology running "under the hood" wasn't around during the 1990s - are still governed by the same principles that have been a part of the World Wide Web for the past twenty-odd years: namely, interactivity.
Proponents of the term "Web 2.0" would have us believe that this "new" entity is more interactive and user-oriented than "Web 1.0" ever was, but that's not really the case ... I could list off things like chatrooms and message boards and newsgroups which were used back in the day, that allowed users to have a voice in their online communities. Again, those tools might not have been as sophisticated or efficient as the blogs and wikis of today, but that's to be expected - technology moves forward and improves year after year; that's not revolution, but simply evolution.
That line comes from a briliant article written by tech journalist John C. Dvorak in 2006 (not long after the term "Web 2.0" first began making the rounds), entitled - appropriately enough - "Web 2.0 Baloney":
Web 2.0 is the latest moniker in an endless effort to reignite the dot-com mania of the late 1990s. This one seems to be succeeding. The problem is that little has changed. Bad ideas of the past have been renamed and spiffed up. We're watching a classic example of "old wine in new bottles": Changing the label doesn't make the wine any better, but it does get us to buy more wine.
Here's what's really happening. Some trends that were knocked for a loop by the dot-com bust, such as online retailing, rebounded without anyone resorting to smoke and mirrors. Their growth is steady, and their future seems rosy. But the fallout from the dot-com bust sidetracked many other trends. The assertions of Web 2.0's promoters, a welter of catchy, impressive-sounding phrases, seem nothing more than a rehash of those failed digital panaceas.
Perhaps the inventors of Web 2.0 don't realize what the real trends are, because lost amid the buzzwords and highfalutin conferences is the reality that what people are actually doing online is built around the concept of using the Web to do things yourself. That has been the main thrust of the Internet since its inception. Since simplicity (the core idea underlying self-service) is not a moneymaker, this idea is lost in a fog of terms such as "participation architecture," "play-enabling," "rich experience," "user-contributed folksonomy," "hackability," and "user remixability." But it's all evolution, not the revolution the cheerleaders promote.
This lingo makes no sense to anyone not caught up in the dream. The real dream, by the way, is to get rich quick without doing any real work—except maybe writing some code once. For programmers, this dream dates back to 1981, the start of an era in which coders could be prima donnas, get away with it, and walk away wealthy.
During the late 1990s, the golden ring slipped just past the grip of a lot of wannabes, who are convinced that they can do it right this time around—if only there is another dot-com surge. Web 2.0 is a rallying point. Maybe cheerleading will make it happen! But what they are cheerleading for, a slew of vague and meaningless concepts, shows that they have no clue about what they are doing.
Anyway, when I first saw the title to Notess' article, I thought it would feature more of the same rhetoric ... So I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was not buying into the "hype" like so many authors I have read in the library field.
He defines the "nebulous Web 2.0 concept" as a "second wave of Web techniques to create more interactive and easy-to-use Web sites", but acknowledges that these tools are also "using older technologies in a new way" (not necessarily re-inventing the wheel) and that "the 1990s Web included many social aspects and even used some Web 2.0 technologies" ... This is already a lot more than many authors on the subject are willing to admit; I've read countless articles which try to paint "Web 2.0" as groundbreaking and unique, all the while sweeping supposed "Web 1.0" technologies under the rug as "static" and no longer relevant. It was refreshing to see an author not trying to pretend that the goals and ambitions of these new tools are somehow distinct from that which came before them.
All that I'm saying is that we should be wary about declaring something as totally brand new when - more realistically - it is simply an extension and evolution of past accomplishments. Adopting a term like "Web 2.0" (and by extension, the term "Library 2.0") is - for me - akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater; in order to appear "hip" and relevant, we risk downplaying (and possibly outright negating) all that which came before.
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