In the year since the first Web 2.0 Conference the term "Web 2.0" has definitely become part of the mainstream technological vocabulary. Indeed, it seems that any new Internet offering feels that using the term is an essential part of its product description. Further evidence is given by the ever-increasing number of hits returned by a search on Google for "Web 2.0".
Time O'Reilly and John Battelle, in their welcome speech at this year's conference feel that the important thing now is that the focus is put squarely on substance and that the Web 2.0 concept doesn't suffer from a cycle of hype.
It's hard to deny that the web is becoming a platform: the evidence is in sites like housingmaps.com, which can be seen as a sort of platonic ideal of the mashup. More than anything, it is mashups that define the new approach to web application development.
O'Reilly and Battelle discuss the impact of the new lightweight business models that have arisen, which concentrate on building on top of the platform and using the infrastructure already in existence. This points to a couple of key principles for the coming years: data is the next "Intel Inside"; the web is about the collective.
In other words, this is the year of things running on the platform, rather than the notion of the platform itself.
John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author who has founded or co-founded businesses, magazines, and websites. Currently on leave from Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Battelle, 38, is also a founder and Executive Producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and "band manager" with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, Chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures.
Battelle has just published "The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google" (Portfolio 2005), and is the monthly "Titans of Technology" columnist for Business 2.0 magazine. He also maintains a daily site covering the intersection of media, technology and the internet at www.battellemedia.com. Battelle was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and a finalist in the "Entrepreneur of the year" competition by Ernst & Young. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.
O'Reilly continues to pioneer new content developments on the Web via its O'Reilly Network affiliate, which also manages sites such as Perl.com and XML.com. O'Reilly's conference arm hosts the popular Perl Conference, the Open Source Software Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim O'Reilly has been an activist for internet standards and for Open Source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the "summit" of key free software leaders where the term "Open Source" was first widely agreed upon, and, most recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. He received Infoworld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community.
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