...from an email about "Web 2.0/RIA"

I think it's worth noting, for the record, that "Web 2.0" technologies are not the same as RIA technologies RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies such as Writely or Gmail, though in the subject line of this email they are connected by a slash character. There are a veritable gaggle of web2.0 developments that don't involve rich browser applications. e.g. del.icio.us, flickr, digg, the tools at 37signals.com, etc. This myriad of new tools seems to revolve around a certain idea (though it is hard to get people to agree on the formulation of that idea). It has something to do with user participation, user-generated content, and a style of thinking about the web in a somewhat new way.

What is that new way? For my money, web2.0 is about a mass of people realizing that they can treat the web as a platform (not as a collection of pages).

What would this mean. Well, take your bookmarks list, in your web browser. There it is. You can bookmark stuff. If the web is a platform, then why not synthesize a "web page" out of your bookmarks list, so you can access it from any computer. Why not make it publicly available (when that makes sense) to your friends and contacts, so they can benefit from your bookmarks, and you can share in theirs. After all, that's what the web is good at.

And we can go a step further, and loosen our grip on the "web page" idea. . . .Why not break down the "bookmarks web page" into little chunks, so that if people want to subscribe to it as a "feed", they can receive your new bookmarks as you mint them. And they can receive them not just in a web browser, but as little emails, or text messages, or any other crazy way they want to get them. It can be up to them.

Also, why not encourage you, the bookmarker, to add a little bit of keyword tagging to your bookmark when you make it, so that people can browse and search around the big pool of everybody's bookmarks, by means of these keyword tags. If some of your bookmarks are marked "recipe" and some are marked "archery", that simple act actually provides a powerful lever to help everyone sift and sort the mass of bookmarks being created every day by all users.

OK, so that's del.icio.us vs a bookmarks file. Web 1.0, meet Web 2.0.

Some clever people had their minds wrapped around the web-as-platform idea from the beginning, of course, which is why plenty of web2.0ish ideas have been around, in fragmentary form, since the inception of the web. And that's why so many clever people are out there curmudgeoning about web2.0 now -- cuz they thought of it first.

Of course they did. But the thing is, Web 2.0 isn't a set of thoughts; it's a set of thoughts that make little sense until a critical mass of people starts to think those thoughts together. Sort of like doing double-dutch jumping roping: you need people to hold the ends of the ropes. Web2.0 is the social phenomenon we see as a critical mass of people starts to grasp the idea of the web as a platform. The idea of del.icio.us -- and it's a fairly slippery, web-centric idea -- is quite normal now to a few million people. Its becoming a normal idea IS the "revolution" (if one is required) of web2.0. It simply wasn't a normal idea in 1995, except among a small coterie of people. So people could have built del.icio.us back then, technologically speaking, but it would be a party that nobody comes to.

(There del.icio.us back in 1995. The people who really understood what the web could do, back then, might have been clever (I styled myself one of them), but they weren't so clever as to build a single one of the tools that we now see in ascendance. I do recall that SixDegrees was a lame attempt to do something like Friendster . . . by email!!!)

An analogy occurs to me between web2.0 and another reviled marketing term: rock and roll. Musical purists will say that the basic elements of rock and roll can be found in sources A, B, and C, far predating the popularity of rock and roll or the coining (appropriating, actually) of the term "rock and roll". But I think everybody sort of knows now, on some level, that rock and roll isn't purely an innovation in musical form: it's also a social upheaval in which a large mass of people embraces that musical innovation. And even the purists will probably grant that a mass audience was needed -- the wide currency of rock and roll ideas was needed -- to bring the music into its fullest development, in the following decade.

I think the same is true here.