the reflexions insider

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that have started to take root: “perpetual beta”, “mashups”, “wikinomics”, “crowdsourcing”, “collaborative media.” As a technical person who respects precision, these kinds of words can be maddeningly vague and nebulous. But they’re part of the energy of the current web development marketplace and for better or worse they have value to its constituents.

As the changelog on its Wikipedia entry will attest, the term “Web 2.0″ has about as much buzz-factor and is about as amorphous in its meaning as anything hot off the pages of the marketing trades.

But language, however imprecise, is the currency of upheaval. My hope is that the language of “web 2.0″ doesn’t obscure its implications for the future of the internet.

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