Prof. Mike Wesch from Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography project posted the above video to YouTube, which is clear explanation of what Web 2.0 is all about.

I have to say I hate the term Web 2.0 as it is really just the Web (indeed the early Internet before the Web) ‘done properly’ both in terms of recognising its core value and in terms of design. It’s a term that has been terribly banded around by eLearning software marketeers ‘experts’ and I’ve seen things such as “Web 2.0 enabled” around the place, which is totally meaningless. Now everyone things they need to be getting some of that ‘Web 2.0′ for the ‘internets’ (or maybe the Interweb ).

Of course we like to think we’ve been creative collaborative, participatory social networks for some time now. My own catchphrase for about 14 years has been that the most interesting content on the internet is other people. This was true back in the very early days of MUDs and MOOs, which were really text-only versions of the same thing - you could participate in social groups, build your own spaces, they had APIs that enabled you to mash-up their code a bit. Tagging and folksonomies weren’t really there though in those days.

I think I like the expression “the machine is us” - it’s much less of a dysphoric Big Brother-style idea of the future of all of these current trends and emphasises the continually existence of the human element. Now we just need to come up with a better name for it.

There is a transcript and discussion of The Machine is Us/ing Us on the Digital Ethnography blog (of course they have a blog). It seems they were slightly caught out by the interest:

Becky (one of my students) noted that it is like we were planning for a party and the guests arrived before we were ready. So please pardon the mess.

(Thanks to Mike at Digital Agency for posting the link originally.)