web 2.0

When people talk about Web 2.0 it's this all-new, never-seen-before thing. If you think back to the 19th century, if you wanted to listen to a song you'd get the family together, go into the parlor and everybody would pick up their instruments and play a song.Over the course of the 20th century that changed with the invention of radio, movies and television, so that when you wanted to listen to a song it wasn't something you made yourself; it was something you purchased and consumed. The idea of people making music or art or entertaining themselves is much older and I think more fundamental. A lot of the more creative outlets you see in Web 2.0 are a return to that more fundamental human nature.People think about the bubble of 1999 and 2000 and bursting over 2000 and 2001. What really mattered both in the macro-economic sense and to individuals were the public markets, the crazy IPOs, the insane valuations and then the money that a lot of individual investors lost, either directly investing in stocks or mutual funds.It might be a better name for a point in history, an era, rather than any specific technology, partly because no one really agrees on what the ingredients of Web 2.0 are. I think it's useful for describing the innovations that happened after the collapse of the dotcom bubble -- the sorts of business models and Web technologies that developed.