At least get your facts right
I don't mind criticism, but I do mind misinformation. Bill, you clearly don't understand much about how I've defined "Web 2.0." Ajax and mashups are two small parts of a very big picture, and in fact, I've often noted that Ajax in particular is an insignificant part of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is ultimately the move to the internet rather than the PC as the dominant computing platform, and what I've tried to do is to outline some of the "rules" for success on that platform.
These are rules like: "It's a network, stupid. So be sure to harness network effects." (That's "harnessing collective intelligence.") And I point out that the mechanisms for that harvesting can be as simple as Amazon's relentless pursuit of user annotation, clever hacks like Google's PageRank, which understood that watching user behavior (in the form of links) was as important as the content of the documents themselves, to business models like that of craigslist, which relies so heavily on user self-service, to P2P architectures like those of Skype, which allows them to service millions of simultaneous users without any large central infrastructure.
I also point out that "data is the intel inside." That is, we're moving from a software-centric business ecosystem to one that is data-centric. And I point out that failure to understand that fact will leave many companies holding the short end of the stick.
I do talk about lightweight programming models and techniques, of which Ajax is one, but that is only a small part of the move to server-based, database-backed computing, where the software infrastructure is the foundation for a much lighter weight presentation layer.
I'd suggest that anyone who wants to criticize my ideas about web 2.0 at least read my paper, What is Web 2.0? (http://www.oreillynet.com/go/web2), and respond to what it says (rather than what they imagine it says), and perhaps follow some of my more recent comments on my blog, The O'Reilly Radar (http://radar.oreilly.com).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
