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This is the first in a series of posts that will examine Web 2.0 as it applies to Internet Marketers. I see too many marketers using so called “Web 2.0″ strategies as just another method of pushing useless junk out in front of people who don’t really want to see it. This new internet is organic in nature, and if you don’t recognize that, your traditional methods will fail. In all honesty, I am rather new to this arena myself, so please understand that these posts are as much “notes to me” as they are anything else. It is my hope that as we go along, we will gain a better understanding of this field, and ideally develop deep and lasting relationships with real people, rather than “customers”, or worse, “demographics”. To that end, your comments and feedback are always welcome.

What is Web 2.0?

It’s one of the most over used terms on the Internet today. It has been applied (or misapplied) to everything from static sites with rounded corners, to online applications such as Google Docs and NetVibes. But what is Web 2.0, really? The term, first coined in 2004 by O’Reilly Media, has been defined to mean:

(the) perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

Courtesy Wikipedia

Since then, other definitions have sprung up, ranging from technical descriptions involving such geekspeak as “ajax” and “xml”, to more prosaic explanations describing the social aspects of blogging and bookmarking sites. The common denominator found in all of these definitions is one of functions. They all refer to the sites and technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 classification, and say very little about the fundamental concepts of this brave new internet.

Web 2.0 is not a suite of new technologies, encompassing all that is the latest and greatest in online collaboration, but rather a return to the roots of the internet, facilitated by these new technologies. The internet was originally conceived as, and developed to be, a communications platform. In the intervening years, as the net grew and evolved, the emphasis rapidly became one of feeding the machine. It was all about the Pentiums, baby!

The second generation of the internet is a turn around from that machine oriented view, once again directing our focus towards the communicators rather than the means of communication. The tools and technologies that we call Web 2.0 are just that, tools. Tools designed to do just one job: allow us to communicate. Me to you, you to him, and him to her, seamlessly.

Our technologies have progressed far enough now that we can begin to ignore them. The big words involved here are “ubiquitous” and “embedded” technologies. In a nut shell, they mean everywhere and in everything. While ubiquitous and embedded may make some privacy advocates nervous, I think that in the long run they are probably good things, because in order to make a technology ubiquitous and embedded, you must make it so easy to use that you can forget that it’s there. You might think of it as the gas pedal on your car. You know its there, and you use it when you need it, but even when you are using it, you aren’t particularly thinking about the pedal. You just use it. This allows you to focus on the road, and your destination.

So what is Web 2.0? It is the people of the internet. You. Me. Us. Talking, sharing, communicating and collaborating on anything and everything that takes our interest. Now with sites that can remember us, and adapt to our changing whims and patterns, the tech of the net has come full circle, and begun to serve us.

Web 2.0 is a vibrant community of human beings sharing their interest, thoughts, and feelings through email and video, forums and bookmarking sites. It is the ultimate “reach out and touch someone”. It is not the communications channels, or the collaborative sites, or the cool technologies with funny names. It’s you and I having a conversation here on my blog, or on Facebook, or Digg, or wherever we happen to find each other. I believe that the day is coming when we will be able to virtually ignore the technologies involved in the creation of the net much in the same way that we routinely ignore the tires under our car. The machine will serve its purpose, and our lives will continue, all the richer for it.

And that’s just as it should be.