What is Web 2.0? You redefine the paradigm

Collective intelligence - It's not just for badgers

Friday Poll Results Three weeks ago we asked you - what does "Web 2.0" mean? What is it, really? No one who promotes the buzzword seems to be able to explain it. Even after a few mystical incantations of "collective intelligence" - we were none the wiser.

So we opened the floor to Register readers - the people who keep the machines running when all the hypes come and go.

And you answered our plea.

And how you did. From Manhattan to Mongolia (really) - from the Fortune 100 to charities, local authorities, IT vendors and distributors, came the suggestions. Thick and fast.

As many of you had written in within in 24 hours than had actually attended the $2000 a head "Web 2.0" conference. That's five a minute.

This was impressive.

But what we didn't expect was the level of vitriol you threw at this latest nebulous piece of metaphysical marketingese. A few of you were clearly hitting your Random Buzzword Generators hard. But overall, almost half of Register readers shunned the five suggested choices and wrote in your own. Many also supplemented the official suggestions with some very creative work.

Here's a selection to give you an idea.

Web 2.0 is made of ... 600 million unwanted opinions in realtime

Paul Moore

Web 2.0 is made of ... emergent blook juice

Ian Nisbet

Web 2.0 is made entirely of pretentious self serving morons.

Max Irwin

Web 2.0 is made of ...Magic pixie dust (a.k.a . Tim O'Reilly's dandruff)

Jeramey Crawford

Web 2.0 is the air for the next bubble

Paul.Witherow

Web 2.0 is made of ... a lot of thin but very hot air blown at you by those who are convinced that having nothing to say is by no means a good reason to shut up.

Roon Micha

Web 2.0 is made of ... a row boat made up of a rather large hole.

Ted Crafton

Web 2.0 is made of ... les gazeuses des sapeurs-pompiers

Vaughan Lewis

Web 2.0 is made of ... 2 parts flour 1 part milk and 3 parts broken dreams

Daniel Nicholson

Web 2.0 is made of ... Sk^H^Hhype.

Edward Grace

Web 2.0 is made of ... a collective dynamic think-process

Ben Shephard

Web 2.0 is ... the vapourware output of people moving forward in pushing back the envelope of the corporate paradigm (to the sound of whalesong)

Michael Shaw

Web 2.0 is made of ... more ways for providers to rip us off

Mike Bunyan

Web 2.0 is made of ... millions upon millions of bandwagons, circled into one giant investor cluster-f**k

Richard Ellis

Web 2.0 is made of...the easily led

Colin Jackson

Web 2.0 is made of ... blooks and flooks?

Thomas Borgia

Web 2.0 is made of ...Porn 2.0

Phil Standen

Web 2.0 is made of ... the skin that forms on the top of the soup of the collective consciousness

Troy Fletcher

Web 2.0 is made of ... marketing and collaborative self-deception

Dave Burt

Web 2.0 is made of ...recycled tech blurbs, stitched together at random (a la software that randomly generates scientific articles, previously mentioned by El Reg), submitted surreptitiously to the blog hive mind.

B. Shubin

Web 2.0 is made of ... Diarrhoea for Work Groups (TM) - it keeps you entertained for a long time, spreads quickly and contains no hard facts.

Florian Merx

By now you've clocked that many of the write-in suggestions are far more hostile to Web 2.0 than our original suggestions - namely "Badger's Paws", "A Magic Swirling Ship", "Recycled copies of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 newsletter", "Nothing".

In fact it's the most vitriolic outpouring from readers directed at anything in this reporter's experience.

So let the bloodletting continue -

Web 2.0 is ... complete crap, hype and bullshit and other self absorbed West Coast navel gazing pastimes

Doug Moncur

Web 2.0 is made of ...an infinite number of bloggers randomly generating Shakespeare. Professionals have no hope against infinity.

David Bond

Web 2.0 is like all the colors of the Rainbow remixed and remixed on a palette until it has that grayish-brown shit color

Alan Kaim

Web 2.0 is made of ... Ballmer's supply of "slightly worn" office chairs...

Steven Griffiths

Web 2.0 is made of ... over-eager people

James Cole

Web 2.0 is made of ... dreams - but if Web 1.0 is any indicator they will be wet-dreams

Stuart Morrison

Web 2.0 is made of ... Segway spare parts

Ben Letham

Web 2.0 is made of ... unsold Amstrad e-mailers

James Jeffrey

Web 2.0 is made of ...ideas without Foundation

Daryl Bamforth

Web 2.0 is made of …. staggeringly beautiful silken threads of links through hyperspace, capturing the purity of the morning's dew of condensed ideas and the rotting remains of semi-digested beatle-blogs.

Andrew Alcock

Web 2.0 is made of ... a collective of genetically modified intelligent microbes communicating though brainwave synchronization

Ben.Wells

Web 2.0 is made of ... Love and Peas

Mark Nellist

Web 2.0 is made of ... a collaborator trick to create a hive mind for the Borg Queen's ascendancy

Joe Robertson

Web 2.0 is made of ... infosphermekinalization

Perran Hill

Web 2.0 is made of …Outsauce

Jared Earle

Web 2.0 is the wet dream of wicky fidlers everywhere

Robin Pollard

Web 2.0 is made of a mix of SCO integrity, M$ stable code, George Bush's ethics, Bill Gates' personality and rocking horse sh!te

Alastair Bravey

Web 2.0 is made of...ground up marketing demons repackaged and rebranded to sell something that has existed on the internet since it begun. It's just a buzz word to get management interested in spending money

Roy Davis

Web 2.0 is made of a trillion shimmering threads of light, my data, your data, shared services, self improving programs, all human knowledge, all human experience, all those viruses, all your stash of "Scandinavian amateur photography", all my financial information!, all the PFY's collection of Paris Hilton videos!!.....WTF!!! Why does my screen say "42"?

Alan Boyd

You get the idea. All very impressive. Now let's analyze these numbers, and see if we can generate our own "meme map".