What’s in a name?

Over on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow has a piece about the O’Reilly / Web 2.0 trademark issue that I mentioned yesterday. O’Reilly are asserting that Web 2.0 is their trademark, thereby assuring everyone they’ve well and truly jumped the shark in terms of being a name to trust in web culture.

What I don’t understand is – and I realise I’m being a hypocrite here – why we have to use the ‘web 2.0’ term at all. Can’t we all agree to just call it the web? Any non-static website that doesn’t use the ‘web 2.0’ technologies is obsolete, end of story. While it was a useful marketing term, that’s what it always was: marketing. This stuff is changing the direction of software and how we use computers; I think what we call it is really the least important of the many issues we’re going to have to deal with.


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