After the keynote I attended a tutorial on best practices in web development sponsored by Bill Cullifer of the the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW).
David Leip from IBM and David Shrimpton from the University of Kent talked about Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 phenomenon is exemplified in the difference between mapquest and google maps, ofoto and flickr, britannica online and wikipedia, personal websites and myspace, stickness and syndication, etc. The value of a website can no longer be measured by how many people visit it. Instead people can subscribe to feeds off the website and get all the benefits without ever actually visiting the site.
Websphere is IBM's Java Enterprise Application Server. It's biggest competition no longer comes from products like BEA WebLogic, but instead from Amazon. Amazon offers people a virtual e-marketplace that handles all the accounting, advertizing, searching, buying, selling and refunds. All you have to do it set up the user account and use their APIs. Very easy and very cheap; very Web 2.0.
Another Web 2.0 phenomenon is the perpetual "beta". A product is never finished, but rather is continuously re-evaluated and refined. Updates can be pushed to all users, since the entire application lives on the web.
New application create buzz by being genuinely fun to use. Google Maps delights its visitors. The wow-factor makes people stay loyal. However, as soon as things start to go wrong, people will very quickly switch to using another service that works. Word of mouth is the way! Google never advertise; they don't have to.
Web 1.0 was all about commerce, Web 2.0 is all about people (what Web 3.0 will be is still written in the stars). The myriad number of WS* standards may be useful and necessary for the enterprise, but any normal person will be totally bewildered by WS*-standards vertigo. Web 2.0 is about the people taking back the Internet.
In the Web 2.0 world accessibility matters. Don't use red and green together on a web page, some people are color blind. Use xHTML and CSS, some people use screen readers.
AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) is the new buzzword. It was only coined by Jesse james Garrett on February 18, 2005 and already everyone is talking about it. All there is to it is the realization that you can use the XMLHttpRequest javascript function to ask for something from a server. This makes sophisticated Web 2.0 application possible. For example:
Writely - an online word processor
Kiko - an online calendar
Box - online file storage
Exclusive, hierarchical, fixed taxonomies are out. Flexible, flat, multi-tag, emergent folksonomies are in.
Microformats decree: Humans first, machines second. They are the lower-case semantic web. They use simple semantics, adding to the stuff that's already there, instead of inventing this hugely complicated description logic stuff (that I'm working on). Microformat are cheap, easy and, as long as people agree on them, they can be just as powerful and interoperable as if you had created a full XML-Schema monster. More at microformats.org and programmableweb.com.