Bill Thompson is correct in saying the Web 2.0 is not a cure for all the online world's woes. Scalability, non-proprietary APIs, etc are all desirable. And he is disappointed that "Web 2.0", touted by some the next step in web technology, does not address these concerns at a nuts-and-bolts level.

But he's slightly missing the point.

Web 2.0 is not really about low level technology, any more than the craze for moving from personal websites to 'portals' was. It is about the use that technology gets put to. "Adhocracy". "Long tail". "User generated ratings". There is nothing there that couldn't have been doing in basic HTML and perl cgi. It is not about the low level technology. Its about the thinking.

Now you can argue that mashups are new and would benefit from design at levels below the presentation layer, and I'd agree. But that doesn't invalidate the 'people can generate not just more content than companies, they can generate or find more compelling content' idea.

Now, if you want to talk the next revolution beyond (or perhaps in parallel with) Web 2.0, which we all pray will not be called Web 3.0, you need to start looking at trust, the ownership of the data on who trusts whom, and truely scalable ways of distributing and making usable such data without relying on any centralised power or authority.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~douglasr/amicog/