Web 2.0 is not just a viral term used to describe the broad set of techno-social changes on the Web; it is also a general way of looking at things, an ideology. This ideology is a set of ideas that was proposed by the founder of a large technology publishing house, Tim O’Reilly, in 2004. While some of his propositions are accurate, others, which are suggested (but largely remain untold) have to be discredited. This essay will first trace back the term, situate it, and then make the ahistoricity of this branding effort transparent.

The Power of Naming
Public discourse is controlled by those who manage to manipulate the language of the debate. In 2006, "Web 2.0" was the Wikipedia article with the highest number of incoming, external links. The Web 2.0 Ideology is a marketing tool that falsely reframes the steady evolution of the Web as a sudden explosion, a big bang of techno-social components that were then collected under the conceptual umbrella of the newly created brand. While the Web 2.0 concept was initially criticized, the market logic that it proposes as common-sensensical, remains largely unchallenged. Entrepreneurs welcome the term, amateurs thought that they were learning something, pragmatists surrendered, while a few others are looking for less ideologically charged language. O'Reilly's branding idea, associated with radical novelty, sells books and tickets to events but most importantly, it has the potential to excite venture capitalists, not completely unlike the years of the dot-com mania.

Web 2.0
The ideas associated with the Web 2.0 brand were often discussed. In October 2004, the term was coined by Tim O’Reilly and his colleague John Battelle. Both men brainstormed the topical focus of an upcoming conference about the Web, came up with the term and trademarked it. Two years later, at a UC Berkeley commencement speech, Tim O'Reilly said:

    "If history is any guide, the democratization promised by Web 2.0 will eventually be succeeded by new monopolies, just as the democratization promised by the personal computer led to an industry dominated by only a few companies. Those companies will have enormous power over our lives -- and may use it for good or ill."

    "At a more foundational level of collective understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in producing their own cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more critical and reflective culture (130)."

    "The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic, social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life (130)."

 
Talk of novelty is equally misplaced when it come to wikis. Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb on the Internet in 1995. And the first version of RSS, a format for syndicating content, was created by Netscape in 1999.

Application Programming Interface (API) is an additional technology at the core of Web 2.0. APIs  interconnect websites just like a door way through which people with the right “key” can pass; they facilitate the link between one computer program and another. Open APIs allow programmers to write applications that access the rich databases at Google, Facebook or Yahoo.  In the past, companies protected their APIs like treasures. But more recently, they decided to share their APIs, allowing developers to build their own hybrid mash-up software. Frappr, for example, uses GoogleMaps and adds layers of conversations on top of them.

Hardly the latest marker of the evolution of the Web, Extensible Markup Language (XML) facilitates the sharing of data across different systems on the Internet. XML 1.0 became a “W3C Recommendation” already in 1998.

Folksonomy, however, was popularized in 2004. It stands for collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, social tagging. It is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. While the Web has always been social, the scale of participation is new. It did not, however, explode over night but was the result of the steady growth of the Web. Today, online participation is made easier because of increased familiarity, easier-to-use tools and broader access to bandwidth and technologies.

Also new is the term AJAX, first coined by Jesse J. Garrett in 2005. It means that Javascript is now working in a way that allows web-based applications to function much like traditional desktop software. AJAX makes web pages feel more responsive by exchanging only small amounts of data with the server so that one does not have to reload the entire web page, each time when requesting a change. While the term AJAX is new, it uses a set of decade-old, existing technologies.

While neither user-generated content, XML, RSS, wikis, blogs, CSS, the network effect, or social networking sites were new in 2004, it is correct that folksonomies as well as the current scale of participation are indeed new.

The Web 2.0 Ideology
Web 2.0 ideologues say that control is bad but in fact control is only increasing as Lawrence Lessig warns us in his book Code 2.0. Other abreviations of this rethoric include: openness--good, authority--bad, hierarchy--bad, and amateur creativity--good.

With Web 2.0, services, rather than products are offered and users are encouraged to participate. Architectures of participation allow networked publics to achieve what Pierre Levy called Collective Intelligence. Networked individuals refer each other to useful content. They page rank, tag, follow and "unfollow." The line between amateur and professional gets blurred when users collaborate to write blogs and wiki entries. Users tag content online and therefore in many cases editorial classification is made unnecessary.

The claim of the relinquishing of control, an essential part of the Web 2.0 ideology, is a myth as William Blaze argues:

    "What separates the Web 2.0 from that plain old "web" is the establishment and entrenchment of a hierarchy of power and control. This is not the same control that Microsoft, AOL and other closed system/walled garden companies tried unsuccessfully to push upon internet users. Power in the Web 2.0 age comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders and standard definers."