Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that let people collaborate, and share information online. In contrast to the first generation, Web 2.0 gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages.

If that isn't as exciting a description as you had hoped you'd find, in the following posts I've sketched out a brief run-down of some of the most-basic concepts behind web 2.0, dynamic websites and how the worldwide web today is little like the hyperlinked billboards of the 1990s.

I'm hoping some people find this helpful. More below....

But breakthroughs, both large and small, are like that.

When calculus was first introduced, there were no text books on what Newton and Leibniz had discovered. The knowledge was largely word of mouth and it took one of the Bernoullis to put together a first pass book about calculus. It would be hundreds of more years before Thomas' Calculus would flood every modern scientific school of higher learning.

Part of what we are seeing is a moving target.

I once heard a graduate student put it this way,

The text books are at least a couple years behind the latest advances.

To understand what has happened in the last year, we go to the journals - which are usually six months to a year behind what is happening.

To get more recent informations, Conferences and Symposia are a place where data is a month or two to six months old.

To get what the latest is? "It's like we're sitting now," he said, "over coffee."

Today it is even faster than that grad student said. I don't wait to see him in the Student Union Building where we can chat about the cutting edge.

The cutting edge is happening all at once on the internet, just as fast as people can get the information up and moving.

Surely there is a place for a good horn book and reference manual, but you know you're in a revolutionary mode when things are happening faster than the press can report them.