Great Post about Web 2.0 on John Battelle's Searchblog

John Battelle's Searchblog: "September 21, 2004
Web 2.0 Draws Near
Over at O'Reilly, Tim's posted his thoughts on why Web 2.0 is a meme with legs, and he's inviting feedback from his readers on what they'd like to see asked of all the speakers we have coming to converse. I'd like to do the same - you guys have always kept me honest, and the conference is really shaping up to be something else again. As Tim puts it:
I'm talking about the emergence of what I've started to call Web 2.0, the internet as platform. We heard about that idea back in the late 90s, at the height of the browser wars, but that turned out to be a false alarm. But I believe we're now starting the third age of the internet -- the first being the telnet-era command line internet, the second the web -- and the third, well, that tale grows in the telling. It's about the way that open source and the open standards of the web are commoditizing many categories of infrastructure software, driving value instead to the data and business processes layered on top of (or within) that software; it's about the way that web sites like eBay, Amazon, and Google are becoming platforms with rich add-on developer communities; it's about the way that network effects and data, rather than software APIs, are the new tools of customer lock-in; it's about the way that to be successful, software today needs to work above the level of a single device; it's about the way that the Microsofts and Intels of tomorrow are once again going to blindside established players because all the rules of business are changing.
Time and again as I report in this space, I'm struck by how different this time round is from the late 1990s. For example, today I spoke with Jeff Weber, who runs USAToday's digital publishing efforts, and we had a robust conversation about publishing models, new and old. I was p"