Web 2.0

In 2001, the bursting of the dot-com bubble led some analysts to argue that the World Wide Web was overhyped. A few years later, in a brainstorming session to organize a conference in the fall of 2004, technology publisher Tim O’Reilly and web pioneer Dale Dougherty noted that the organizations and companies that survived the crash were more important than ever and that they had similar business models, design, and development patterns. The term Web 2.0 was adopted to describe the emergent physiognomy of the web and to name the upcoming conference.

The term Web 2.0 has been criticized as being a marketing buzzword and as promoting the idea of a technological revolution that did not happen. But O’Reilly and Dougherty’s analysis of the use of ...