Boris Mann's blog

Tim Bray doesn't like the buzzwordy-ness of the Web 2.0 label, but Tim O'Reilly does.

Sam Ruby does a great (if somewhat technical) review of the validity of the term:

Web[0] is exemplified by static home pages, published in
broadcast mode.  Many weblogs today continue to operate in
this fashion.

Web[1] is exemplified by e-commerce shopping carts, enabling two
way interaction between business and consumers.  Comments and
Trackbacks are in this category.

Web[2] is characterized by action-at-a-distance interactions and
ad hoc integration.  By my putting a link
here, your page rank is
changed there.  A book I
purchase today affects Amazon’s recommendations tomorrow.

I consider

AJAX to be “merely” an optimization of an
implementation detail of Web 1.0.  On the other hand, I
consider the integration of
Google and craigslist to
be very Web 2.0.  As is
GreaseMonkey,
Technorati, and even
e-bay and
Wikipedia.

Sam Ruby: Agile Web 2.0 Development

We need something to describe the combination of new activities we're seeing, and to put things in one category or another. Does this website or technique exemplify Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 thinking? We don't have all the rules down yet, but we know when we see it.

Rhode Island is jumping into Web 2.0 with both feet. They've got a full set of REST-based XML web services around an application called GovTracker. The quote below is from the blog of an employee at the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC) website -- which is itself built on top of Plone, an open source content management system:

Web 2.0 applications lean towards making small pieces of data available to users in such a way that the data can easily be married to other small pieces of data from disparate sources. If government is to succeed in serving its citizenry and engaging civic participation, government technology decision makers must find a way to resolve the dissonance between the flexibility of Web 2.0 in the private sector and the legacy of restrictive monolithic applications in government.
It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he’s recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street.
Government Open Code Collaborative: S. James Willis - Rhode Island Govtracker Services

If only all governments were this progressive!

(Via Jeff Barr's Blog)