By Ryan Singel | 
SAN FRANCISCO -- No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.
Excitment over emerging new publishing theories -- and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings -- this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital.
Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O‘Reilly, is an "architecture of participation" -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.
The theory has been percolating for some time. But it intensified last week when O‘Reilly published an Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a company that sells collaborative wiki software to enterprises and that is hosting the Web 2.0 wiki, had a simpler definition for conference goers. "Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people," Mayfield said. The day was not without skeptics. In a freewheeling conversation with Web 2.0 conference organizer John Battelle, InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller, who recently purchased Ask.com, dismissed the idea that citizens with blogs and video editing software were major threats to the entertainment industry. "There is not that much talent in the world," Diller said. "There are very few people in very few closets in very few rooms that are really talented and can‘t get out." "People with talent and expertise at making entertainment products are not going to be displaced by 1,800 people coming up with their videos that they think are going to have an appeal." That clear-headed observation didn‘t set well with some, including media critic Jeff Jarvis, who promptly blogged the talk and labeled Diller with the deadly moniker, "Web 1.0." By whatever the theory, Web 2.0 is shaking up the status quo in web publishing, and feeding a surge of dealmaking. Small Web 2.0 companies are already being snapped up by internet giants. Google acquired Dodgeball, a mobile phone social networking application, and recruited one of the princes of mash-ups, Paul Rademacher of Housingmaps.com, from his job at DreamWorks Animation SKG. Yahoo snapped up Flickr, a community photo sharing application that relies heavily on tagging, and on Tuesday, bought Upcoming.org, an user-driven events tracking service. Wednesday afternoon‘s LaunchPad presentation, featuring 13 companies giving six minute pitches, drew throngs, including venture capitalists smelling money to be made from the cleverness of young programmers, and representatives from internet giants trying to determine whether their business models were as doomed as bloggers have prophesied. The crowd was so large that hotel staff had to break down the partitions separating three conference rooms to accommodate everyone. The presentations included a demo of the well publicized, but as yet unreleased, Flock browser, that aims to make Firefox into a two-way communication tool. Ian McCarthy of Orb showed the crowd how his software would let them stream media from their desktop using any web-enabled device, without having to worry about the format or bit rate of their movies or music. Zvents.com unveiled its event finder (which currently covers only the San Francisco Bay Area) and claimed it was far better than the service Yahoo had purchased the day before. Rollyo, short for roll your own search engine, officially launched at the demo, unveiling a service that lets users build their own specific search engines for travel or politics using Yahoo‘s search API. Longtime RSS player Pub Sub unveiled its initiative, Structured Blogging, to help bring the fabled Semantic Web into being. Structured Blogging allows bloggers to easily add structured meta-data to blog posts, such as movie reviews or event listings, so they can be easily found, read and syndicated by other sites. The ad-hoc XML (no standards body has yet decided on what elements should be in such data) would make possible a search for book or product reviews that only returned real reviews, instead of the current jumbled listing of commerce sites and spammers that search engines currently provide. But the crowd reserved its largest applause and its gasps of envy for Zimbra, a company which debuted its open-source enterprise software in early September. The software, called a collaboration suite, performs the same server based calendaring and e-mail of Microsoft‘s Exchange Server. Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj wowed the crowd with his demo of his Ajax-powered web client, which would display the calendar when mousing over a date mentioned in an e-mail and call a number through Skype when clicking on a phone number in a message. Zimbra already has devotees working on the code and translating the interface into Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. Dharmaraj knows he‘s facing a tough battle taking on a flagship Microsoft product, but thinks that Web 2.0-style collaboration and the efforts of the open source community might be his savior. "I would not like to take on the big boy by myself," Dharmaraj told Wired News. "I would love to take Microsoft on with IBM and Google and Apple on my side."
