Written by David Tebbutt in January 2006

A lot of people are betting their shirts that Web 2.0 won't prove to be Bubble 2.0.

What's Web 2.0? Isn't the web the web? Well, not as we once knew it. The web started as a means of delivering more or less static information to readers. The ability to provide a URL for every page meant that, instead of a massive digital library of isolated papers, brochures and the like, it became an interesting and helpful, cross-referenced, hyperlinked and universally accessible (subject to local laws) resource.

Then the monetisers came along and realised that it was a medium up which money could flow and down which digital products and services could flow. It became a digital mirror of the real world, except it was cheap to set up shop and the returns could be massive. Unfortunately not as massive as many investors thought, so much of it came crashing round their ears.

Out of the ashes of the dotcom collapse rose a new phenomenon, symbolised by a caring, sharing kind of culture. It was reminiscent of some aspects of the hippy culture which flourished a few miles away, but many years earlier, in San Francisco. The first popular glimmerings were in weblogs and wikis. Before long, RSS feeds came along and a new collaborative, unselfish, cross-linking and sharing culture emerged. New services such as feed aggregation and blog- and wiki-hosting came into being to support these new uses of the web.

Services with weird names like del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati helped bloggers and other web users to share their information discoveries through social tagging. Unlike the desperate desire to make 'eyeballs stick' which characterised the monetisation of web 1.0, many of the most popular bloggers are those who encourage their visitors to go elsewhere for interesting nuggets of information.

This was the transition phase to what is now being called Web 2.0, a term which now has far too many tag and Google references for it to disappear. Many people try to understand Web 2.0 by looking at the technologies which support it. You may have heard of Ajax or Ruby on Rails, for example. But you'd be looking in the wrong place. The place to look is inside the participants' heads. Ian Davis of UK library software and service company, Talis, sums it up by calling Web 2.0 "an attitude, not a technology."

This is because it is about using the web as a service platform for the delivery of applications which run in the browser and haul data from the most appropriate sources. The services and the data they access may be commercial or "free". (Free isn't always what it seems - Google's adwords might appear, or you may be providing useful information back into the pool.) The applications might come from a single supplier or they may be aggregations of components. They are usually attractive and easy to use. And many of them will scale right down to the mobile phone.

At the low end, you might find mention of 'mashups' - displaying the location of the nearest public toilet on your PDA or mobile phone perhaps. At the top end it could be a fully fledged library management system which aggregates and presents bibliographic, holdings, library and bookseller information, allowing you to interact effortlessly, and probably enjoyably, back through the layers to reserve a title or order it online.

Web 2.0 is certainly here to stay. A lot of what is presently hoarded and protected will to become open and shared and software lock-in will become a thing of the past. A cheering thought indeed.