What is Web 2.0?

Yeah that O’Reilly piece is a very good overview.

Web 2.0 already has a design aesthetic – see this amusing examination of Web 2.0 logos.

2.0 is also about peer production (prosumers and consumer co-creation). There’s a more ecomomics focussed (but excellent) piece at Bubblegeneration.

2.0 technologies allow production to be atomized – to be subdivided into arbitrarily fine microchunks of value activities. Prosumers can self-select and manage their own interactions with these microchunks, rather than incurring the real-world coordination costs of managers, meetings, and red tape.

Because these microchunks of prosumer-contributed information can then be recombined and reused, the community realizes a second network effect: the total value of the network of microchunks is greater than the additive value of each individual microchunks.

All this implies that peer production is an extremely powerful and hyperefficient way to organize the production of goods and service that meet certain criteria. Recently, investment in peer production models has hit an inflection point: Kleiner Perkins’ recent investment in Zazzle is a bet on peer production, as are the new breed of social search startups, such as JetEye, Squidoo, and del.icio.us, as are vertical communities, such as Last.fm, Flickr, and Basenotes.

Powerhouse Museum is heading quickly into the new world. We have several new Web 2.0 influenced projects about to launch – notably our Design Hub and the associated collection database. Conceptually our new web projects are built around a strong core of sociability and we’ve been experimenting a lot with folksonomy ideas.

I do wonder how all this will shake out.