Jeff Veen formerly of Adaptive Path -- now Google -- giving a talk about Web 2.0. Veen had a greatslideshow that he's been generous enough to post on his personal website (here). In this talk, he covers historical precursors to the boom-bust cycles we seem to be experiencing in the tech world over the past twenty years or so. The comparison to the tulip frenzy in Holland in the mid 17th century (Tulip Craze) was interesting but not altogether enlightening about the state of the current tech industry. Perhaps it was just that he didn't have enough time to fully develop this thesis during the talk. I appreciate the sentiment that there's not much new about "new media," but I didn't feel that pointing out market frenzies of yore (another example he cites is the steam engine) lends itself to a precise historical comparison with the state of tech markets today.

Veen argued that one of the major themes of "Web 2.0" is that of giving up control. By this I believe he is referring to the nature of interactive media that gives users control over their own data. Some examples include Digg, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, del.icious, etc. In each case, the traditional hierarchical forms of data have given way to tagging and categorization of data based on social attributes / markup. He argues that the key design concerns are how to blend editorial control and structure along with rich mechanisms for user participation.

A few provocative items from this talk:

• Build Trust -- users are peers
• 1/20th of a second is all it takes for users to develop an opinion about your brand/site's trustworthiness
• In the era of tagging, curation is done by algorithms

Although the talk was very engaging, and the slides were especially well done, I was left wishing for a little more precision of terms and academic rigour. All in all it felt more like a pump-you-up keynote than a critical examination of whatever "Web 2.0" has come to mean.

In my opinion, the term "Web 2.0" lost its meaning long ago and should be put to rest like so many buzzwords from the late 90's.