Just doing my daily feed reading, when I came across this post from AccordionGuy about his take on the whole O'Reilly Web 2.0 thing. Then, I started reading the comments about that, and I saw Shel Israel's post on it and started reading that. Shel wants to call it Web blah-blah-blah because the term Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly and he got a cease and desist order not to use the word Web 2.0 in his Powerpoint presentation. Wow, that's interesting. So, what do we call it then, if it's not Web 2.0?
Then, naturally, it caused me to write a comment on Shel's blog about this. Shel thinks it should be called "social media". Here's my comment to Shel's post.
We like Web 2.0 because well it's part of the computer culture. It all comes from versioning of software products and OSes like Windows 3.1 or WordPerfect 4.0. And it speaks geek speak, because it says it's about the web and it's the second version of the web where the first version was just about creating content and hyperlinks, whereas the second version is about connecting people and resources using the web and building communities and social networks. It's the human aspect of the web. Unfortunately, the non-techie people don't understand what is meant by Web 2.0 and so are confused.
Should we change what we mean by Web 2.0? I'm not sure, our culture is so used to version numbers. I have the problem with the term "social media", because media doesn't have to refer to hyperlinks or web. Perhaps, a better term may be "social hypertext" as quoted by T. Erickson "Erickson, T. (1996). WWW as Social Hypertext. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No.1, pp 15-17" or "social hypermedia" since media does not have to refer to hypertext, it can be video, audio, pictures, etc.
What do people think? Should we call it Web 2.0, and if not, what do we call it? The debate continues.....
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