What is Web 2.0?

The Register recently ran a poll, asking it’s readers, What is Web 2.0?

In the initial article, author Andrew Orloski cites “Transcendental Tim” O’Reilly as nebulously defining “Web 2.0″ as:

“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”

I’d say that’s really just been pushed back to Web 3.0, as the hype and hyperbole surrounding “user generated content” has reached simultaneous highs (YouTube) and lows (MySpace) while the hard-won common sense that prevailed post-bubble is lost in the foggy ether of “emergent paradigms”. But the results of The Register’s “What is Web 2.0″ poll were still a bit alarming, nonetheless.

In the poll, the respondents absolutely savaged “the new paradigm”, using phrases such as “mutual masturbation” and a “great big shit sandwich” to describe the “600 million unwanted opinions in realtime” that is often the effect of giving unrestricted, interactive soapboxes to the entire world, half of which, we must remember, is of below-average intelligence.

A kinder way of putting it is as old a story as humanity itself: The technology is neutral; it’s the usage that people put it to that determines its ultimate moral, economic, and cultural value to society. And to judge by sites like MySpace, that value ain’t real big.