I just stumbled across an old but rather excellent article at O'Reilly which attempts to explain the term "Web 2.0" in terms more specific than are usually accorded to an internet buzzword. Luckily for us, it does a fantastic job.

For those that may not have run across that phrase yet, it is basically an attempt to describe the gradual transformation of the internet from a collection of static pages -- that's closer to the 1996 version of the web -- to a sophisticated and interrelated system of web applications and user networks. Think Facebook, Flickr, and eBay here.

A blog, for example, is much more advanced than a plain collection of HTML would be. Consider the following features:

• RSS feeds are used to pass along new content to interested readers without requiring them to check the site every day, and they do so in a lightweight format that can be easily interpreted on many types of devices, even down to a minuscule cell phone screen.
• Trackbacks occur when blogs refer to one another -- the major blogging platforms all support some automated method of publishing links in the comment section of another site, so upon reading a post, you can automatically proceed to seeing what other people have to say about it elsewhere on the web.
• Permalinks, when combined with the fragmented nature of individual blog posts, allow readers and commenters to point to specific bits of content in a way that wouldn't be possible with A Single Big Page About Some Topic.

That last item is one that hadn't even occurred to me, and the rest of the article is chock-full of so many similar light-bulb moments that there's really no effective way to summarize them here. It's a dense read, but very much worthwhile if you'd like a glimpse into the future of the internet.

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