When the inventor of World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee remarked in a podcast with IBM that Web 2.0 is nothing but a jargon it raised a few eyebrows. This very statement actually made many people think about what really the Web 2.0 thingy was and if Berners-Lee’s statement is true at all.



Web 2.0 pundit Dion Hinchcliffe has come out strongly against the statement in his article today and gave his own reason why Berners-Lee is wrong.



He says that Web 2.0 is more about a change in people and society than a change in technology. He talks about the rise in almost a billion internet users in the last 10 years and how active participation in the Web has changed dramatically towards the positive. He has actually put a graphic to represent this and show how Web 1.0 is different from Web 2.0. See below:



He writes;

Let’s not forget that there were important issues that really held back the early Web and prevented the widespread flourishing of the collaboration and connecting of people that Tim-Berner’s Lee originally intended. This included privacy concerns, almost entirely one-way Web sites, lack of skills using the Internet, and even slow connections. But these have now continued to drop away rapidly in recent years, with many younger people in particular not hindered by these issues at all (rightly or wrongly.)
I agree with Dion that the Web 2.0 thingy is for real and if you asked me, it is vastly different from what the Web 1.0 was. Now, with the Web 2.0 phenomenon, people are ‘in’ the Web than ‘on’ it. The scene is no longer what it used to be then.



Let us know what do think on this issue.



Read the excellent piece by Dion Hinchcliffe