I've been uncomfortable with the term "Web 2.0" from the first moment I heard it. While it's useful to name the many changes that are taking place to collaborative and knowledge-centred Web technologies, Web 2.0 also includes a lot of unrealistic expectations.

I'm finding the talk about Web 2.0 to have some things in common with past technology and media hyperboles: cable TV, the telegraph, and virtual community, all come to mind. It was imagined that each of these technological wonders would bring about fundamental, and usually utopian, transformation. The telegraph, for instance, was expected by some to end all war.

Transformation is a messy business. Expectations are imperfectly met, and all change has unforeseen consequences. The failure to appreciate this can lead some to fall into technological utopianism, fed by a sometimes spiritual yearning to connect to other people more thoroughly and in more meaningful ways.

This doesn't mean there haven't been significant and (I think) positive changes to Web technology in the past five years. With various technical barriers to participation and interaction falling, the Web is becoming more inclusive. Blogs are perhaps the best example of this: anyone who can write and send an email can set up and contribute to a blog, meaning pretty much everyone. Folksonomies have the potential to greatly simplify doing any sort of classification. RSS has made sharing data much easier.

I should have a caveat here: the Web has become easier to participate in for those that have the time, money, skills, and inclination to contribute. According to Jakob Nielsen in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. Even in an environment where blogging is as easy as email, most people can't or won't do it. (One could argue whether or not more user content, or more diversity, would be a good thing, but that's another discussion.)

Like open source software, Web 2.0 seems to depend a great deal on surplus labour and the willingness of people to give up their intellectual property to allow someone else to make money. The people actually creating YouTube's content saw no part of the site's $1.6 billion purchase price, nor does Yahoo! pay members of the Flickr and del.icio.us communities for their stuff.