Web design and development by Front, a strategy, design and technology studio in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Web 2.0 is a term that has been bandied about with great enthusiasm by those inside and outside the web industry. Seeing as I’m attending Web 2.0 in San Francisco in a few weeks, I got to thinking about what Web 2.0 is and isn’t. The term has been used, overused and then overused some more. In a world where buzzwords and jargon come in and go out of date in weeks, “Web 2.0” has certainly been there, and done that - like Napster, Astronaut Ice Cream and VRML.

But, hat-tip to the Bubble that was (and is still in places), the ideas behind Web 2.0 are so still so incredibly compelling. Back in the day when I began building websites *everybody* was an amateur, even the professionals. This was Web 1.0; good, but not great - informative but not always useful.

In the intervening decade, not only has technology improved, (allowing the production, processing, transmission and presentation of rich content) but the profile of the people involved in thinking about and building web applications has changed dramatically. Web technology is the home of all real innovation in the software industry today; from business strategy to user experience design and development.

It’s not a totally new web, the technology is better but not radically different. It’s the quality of the ideas, the quality of the people and their skills, and the committement to making sites and applications that are useful and usable; that in my opinion is the spirit of Web 2.0.

None of this is groundbreaking; but it’s useful (for me anyway) to think about this stuff in advance of the conference. I’ll be Twittering, Flickring and Blogging from San Francisco. I might even get in some training for this, which is another story altogether :)

If you have any thoughts or opinions, please post a comment.