Alex Krupp

Web 2.0 has been a buzzword shrouded in mystery. Although I've heard it used hundreds of times in the past year, I've never been able to find a good definition of what it actually means. This is in part because, as Paul Graham points out, Dougherty coined the term before defining it. When brainstorming on Web 2.0, O'Reilly laid out a list of services that seemed qualitatively different than those that had come before and looked for patterns. What he eventually came up with was a list of seven principles and eight patterns. O'Reilly hits the nail on the head here with his inductive approach. However, I still come away from O'Reilly's manifesto wishing for definitive clarity. So here I set out to put forth a working definition of what Web 2.0 really is, how it differs fro... (more)