The term Web 2.0 was fashionable a couple of years ago, but is less so now. I for one still find it useful to denote a web that is one or both of the following.
- A prominent, perhaps even dominant, platform for application development. So if you develop an application, you think of developing it for the web rather than for specific operating systems.
- Read/write, in that it’s very easy for non-technical folk to contribute content to the web, rather than just to consume content. Of course, blogging is a major aspect of the readily writable web.
I am also tolerant of the practice of sticking 2.0 at the end of something to indicate how that thing is changing along with, and often because of, the web.
But I shudder at the term Blogging 2.0, even though I otherwise quite like the post in which Duncan Riley develops it.
If blogging 1.0 was about enabling the conversation on each blog, blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services. The conversation has matured and no longer is it acceptable to believe that as a content owner you hold exclusive domain over conversations you have started.
Duncan’s argument is that it’s all about the user. By the way, I found Duncan’s post via Louis Gray, who agrees with the argument.
I mostly agree with the Duncan, but have two caveats. First, there are many blogs that are personal journals, and I think that someone who blogs in this way is entitled make that blog all about them.
Second, and more important with respect to the type of blog that the Blogging 2.0 conversation seems to focus on: is Duncan’s Inquisitr blog consistent with the Blogging 2.0 post he made there? If it is, this post will show up a a ping, thus “enabling the conversation across many blogs” (or at least across Inquisitr and the blogs that ping it). But I don’t think that it will…
ps I wish all the best to Duncan and to Inquisitr, and congratulate him on the conversation that he’s generating.