http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
not that this is definitive, but I read this awhile back and find it interesting even if only for insight into the ideological landscape these folks operate from. from this lengthy article, O'Reilly notes that - snicker -- there are no hard boundaries around the definition of Web 2.0 since their central defining concept -- the web as platform -- was an aspect of Netscape's game plan, a company they bill as web 1.0.
"For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk. The first of those principles was "The web as platform." Yet that was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. What's more, two of our initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People don't often think of it as "web services", but in fact, ad serving was the first widely deployed web service, and the first widely deployed "mashup" (to use another term that has gained currency of late). Every banner ad is served as a seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering an integrated page to a reader on yet another computer. Akamai also treats the network as the platform, and at a deeper level of the stack, building a transparent caching and content delivery network that eases bandwidth congestion.
Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later entrants have taken their solution to the same problem even further, understanding something deeper about the nature of the new platform. Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how it's possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing additional <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=3#designpatterns>Web 2.0 design patterns.
Let's drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference."
--
drill down. ugh.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)