Opinion - Is all the talk of Web 2.0 just a lot of codswallop? Web 2.0 is big news, argues David Tebbutt. We're at another turning point in the internet's development with the use of web apps to access information.

A lot of people are putting their shirts on Web 2.0 not turning out to be Bubble 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? Isn't the web the web? Well, not as we once knew it. The web started as a means of delivering more or less static information to readers. The ability to provide a URL for every page meant that, instead of a massive digital library of isolated papers, brochures and the like, it became an interesting and helpful, cross-referenced, hyperlinked and universally accessible (subject to local laws) resource.

Then the monetisers came along and realised that it was a medium up which money could travel and down which digital products and services could flow. It became a digital mirror of the real world, except it was cheap to set up shop and the returns could be massive. Unfortunately, those returns were not as massive as many investors thought, so much of it came crashing round their ears.

Out of the ashes of the dotcom collapse rose a new phenomenon, symbolised by a caring, sharing kind of culture.

The first popular glimmerings were in weblogs and wikis. Before long, RSS feeds came along and a new collaborative, unselfish, cross-linking and sharing culture emerged. Services such as feed aggregation and blog- and wiki-hosting came into being to support these new uses of the web.

Services with names like Furl, del.icio.us and Technorati helped bloggers and other web users to share their information discoveries through social tagging. Unlike the desperate desire to make "eyeballs stick" which characterised the web monetisers, many of the most popular bloggers are those who encourage visitors to go elsewhere for interesting nuggets of information.

This was the transition phase ...