In September of 2005, Tim O’Reilly wrote a now classic article (well, as classic as a year-old article can be) entitled, “What is Web 2.0?”, and ever since then, the term has taken on a life of its own. A Google search brings up over 108 million hits. Technorati, a service that tracks the content of over 50 million blogs, has indexed almost 100,000 posts dedicated to the subject. There are tons of writers who have attempted to define it, and there are many sites dedicated to tracking all things Web 2.0 (the most popular being TechCrunch). Even the mainstream media picked up on it, as you can see from these articles in BusinessWeek, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek.

Because so much has been written about it and in so short a time (less than a year), Web 2.0 critics suggest it is little more than a meaningless buzzword. This may be true on one level: I have heard several people use the term without having a clue about what it could mean and who think their use of the word gives them some sort of technological street-cred. But the criticism that it is just a buzzword ignores the fact that Web 2.0 does mean something, regardless of how many people may be confused about it.

Many of the critics of Web 2.0 insist that it is a misnomer because the majority of “Web 2.0 technologies” have been around for years. They insist that the “2.0″ moniker on today’s World Wide Web implies that the things you can do on it were not possible with Web 1.0, when the truth is that there are very few things being done today that weren’t possible two, three, or even five years ago.

But what these critics miss is that Web 2.0 isn’t about the technology. It’s about what is being done with that technology.

Here’s the major difference betweeb Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The former was little more than a collection of brochures and catalogs, with the best sites being little more than HTML versions of magazines and newspapers. When you visited a Web 1.0 site, you didn’t do anything with it. You just sat and read the words on the screen. Sure, you could search, or you could buy something, or maybe there was a Flash-thingy that you could click on or play around with, but generally speaking, Web 1.0 didn’t give you anything to do.

Web 2.0, on the other hand, is all about doing something with the Web. “What kind of something?,” you ask. Well, whether it’s photos, bookmarks, events, calendars, music, files, to-do lists, ideas, friends, programming code, or simply opinions, Web 2.0 is mostly focused on sharing. When you participate on a Web 2.0 site, you become an active member of a community. You benefit from the other members and you contribute to the experiences of all.

Take this blog, for example. Blogs are considered to be Web 2.0. The question is why?

For a lot of people, blogs are just the personal home-pages of the 1990s (please don’t judge me, but here’s mine from way back when), except they come with a better way of updating the content. But what separates blogs from the old home-pages is that blogs allow more interaction between the blogger and the audience. If you visited that home page from way back when, the only way you could have interacted with me was by sending an e-mail (PS: the e-mail address on that site is no longer active). On this blog, you can leave a comment.

Perhaps that doesn’t sound like a big difference to you, but it is. Because when you sent me that e-mail, you and I were the only ones who saw it. But when you leave a comment here, everyone who visits Fluid Imagination gets to see it. So instead of having a one-to-one conversation with just me, you end up having a many-to-many conversation with perhaps dozens of people. As Pappy O’Daniel said in Oh Brother Where Art Thou, “We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here. We’re MASS communicatin’!”

By participating in the comments section of this blog, you are able to have just as much effect on this site as I do. The difference between a post without any comments and a post with a lively discussion is all the difference in the world. If a visitor comes to Fluid Imagination through a Google search and lands on a post without any discussion following it, then there’s a good chance that visitor will think that Fluid Imagination is written by just another blogger who is screaming into the wind. But if there is a lively discussion at the end of the post, then the visitor might actually sit up and say, “There’s something going on here,” and choose to participate as well.

And that’s what Web 2.0 is all about. It’s about the many talking to the many. It’s not about big companies trying to sell their brand to you, but about individuals who want to connect with each other, not out of loneliness, but because they enjoy participating in active communities.

The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 may sound semantic, but the thing about semantics is that it teaches us that different words mean different things. The desire that people have to use the word “Web 2.0″ means that we’re dealing with something very different here. The Web might have all the same things it had before in terms of technology, but that technology is being used for very different ends, and it’s being used by a lot more people.

And that’s why people are calling it Web 2.0.