I’ve been meaning to write about the concept of Web 2.0, or the meme depending on how high concept you want to get, even though I couldn’t get a press pass to the Web 2.0 conference this week that’s happening on my birthday (Oct. 5th)!  Thanks for the present, y’all.  I really wanted to go and despite my empire building appearance, I just don’t have $2k (or some such crazy fee) to attend this event.  Guess I should have found a way to make it to Foo Camp but I’m half geek not half outdoorsman!

The discussion about what Web 2.0 encompasses can be a bit confusing.  I tend to think of it as the shift from desktop-based applications to web-based applications, for example, from Microsoft Outlook to web-based email.  So it’s something that’s been happening for a while but there’s all sorts of interesting activity and discussion about more recent waves of development and an emergent perspective which goes far beyond a simple shift to web-based apps into exciting territory.

Tim O’Reilly provides an extended explication of the whole Web 2.0 thing which is well worth reading, both for what it clarifies and what it confuses.  Because the concept is a bit off-topic, I’m not going to dig into it at the moment other than to say that the problem with the discussion is the attempt to create a binary that makes something either Web 1.0 or Web 2.0, when they often seem to be a mix, at least based on what the more complicated explanations of Web 2.0 claim.

VC Rick Segal does a fun job of addressing the emerging gospel that everyone will soon be switching to web apps from desktop apps and gets into some of the false binaries that are being created in the process.

But don’t think I’m antagonistic to the Web 2.0 discussion.  It’s giving me a lot to think about and, with the help of people like Marshall Kirkpatrick who’s spreading the 2.0 meme via educational means, I’ll keep getting in deeper and maybe even add a link to save a blog post to Furl and/or Del.icio.us as Marshall recently suggested.

Hey, that’s the kind of thing Hashim Warren is always telling people about at the Hip Hop Bloggers discussion group!  That cat’s always been ahead of his time.