From Dave Winer
There’s actually a third kind of Web 2.0, it’s the province of people who neither make huge piles of money catching bits of Google Wind™ in their sails, nor understand the connection between the various products that get Mike so excited. They just like to be “in” on the latest stupid tech buzzword, to go to conferences wearing natty clothing and calling people evil who dare to criticize the stuff that they’re so hip to. They are friends with other snarky people who go to conferences, wear interesting clothing and call other people evil.
I guess he’s talking about this sort of thing (and here).
Of the nine workshop speakers, three are Yahoo (Yahoo, del.icio.us, flickr), one is from the Workshop organisers, one is a designer who appears to have borrowed heavily from k10k in his time. One’s from Google, one from Feedburner. I don’t know how interesting their clothes will be. The only wonder is that Ben Hammersley won’t be there.
The Web 2.0 AJAX hype is just that - hype. I remember using the XMLHTTP object in IE when it was first available to send data to and fro without needing a form submit. Years ago, that was. And I’m not too taken with some of the leading lights in the movement. Tom Coates, for example, was once rather po-faced when I laughed at his CV, which described him as PhD Classics [incomplete],
. Tom used to teach Greek (presumably Ancient Greek) at a University although, mysteriously, he doesn’t speak Latin. Incidentally, the Tom Coates who speaks so highly of Kong shouldn’t be confused with the Tom Coates who’s an expert in Gromov–Witten invariants and mirror symmetry at Havard. Just in case there was a possibility of confusion…
I’m with Joel Spolsky on Web 2.0:
The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It’s not a real concept. It has no meaning. It’s a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day…
the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless “Web 1.0″ idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade’s mantra, “They just don’t get it!”
