What is Web 2.0?

In the early days of the web, people made web pages, and surfers came to look at them. Web 1.0. But, some web pages realized that they could use the collective wisdom of the visitors to make more information available.

The Internet Movie Database http://us.imdb.com is one of the earliest examples of this: people could vote on which movies they liked best. Real people, not critics. The IMDB was then able to give you a "top 250 movies" (and bottom movies as well) as voted on by real people.

The best known example of the participatory nature of the evolving web is probably Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org and I won't try to explain it, I will leave that to Steven Colbert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmHm0rGns4I

For more about Web 2.0, I think I am legally required to point to Tim O'Reilly's discussion of web 2.0 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

To see a list of interesting web 2.0 sites, visit some "best of web 2.0 sites" at: http://web2.0awards.org/