I'm writing a piece for Cutter called "What's (not) new in Web 2.0". The genesis of the article is my annoyance with the marketing label "2.0" when quite a bit of everything mentioned as a component of Web 2.0 has been around since 1995 (wikis, for instance). Nevertheless, the term has caught on (and I even saw reference to Web 3.0, equating it to the Semantic Web earlier today). Why has the term caught on? Is there really something new in Web 2.0 and does it matter to business?

Andrew McAfee of Harvard has coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to refer to business adoption of Web 2.0 practices (he bitterly recounts trying to write an Enterprise 2.0 article for Wikipedia which was rejected). He offers interesting concepts (read about them here: http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/C24/, but here's my beef: The presence of a technology should not drive fundamental changes in management. In other words, just because you can do something does not mean that you should do something. A wiki is a collaboration tool, but that does not mean that the kind of collaboration supported by wikis is appropriate for every project. A collaborative technology will only thrive in a collaborative environment. If your business employs a top-down management philosophy (which can be perfectly appropriate in many instances), then the manner in which you implement a wiki changes.

Most technologists start with the technology, and seem to imply that the presence of any given technology enables a management practice or makes the adoption of a given management practice essential to remain competitive. That's simply not true. I suspect this is a side-effect of people who are schooled in technology writing about business management topics. This is like my relying on an auto mechanic to give me driving directions to Boston. He may or may not know how to get to Boston, and his advice may or may not be good, but the fact that he's an auto mechanic does not provide him with any special qualifications for telling you how to drive my car to Boston. He can tell you what to do if your car breaks down along the way, and he can tell you how to improve your gas mileage, but the decision to go to Boston is mine and mine alone.

So one day, my mechanic says, "If I change your spark plugs, you'll get much better mileage while driving to Phoenix." I say in return, "That's great, but I'm not going to Phoenix today. I'm flying to Paris." He looks puzzled and says, "You mean to tell me that you don't want to improve your gas mileage? All your neighbors are going to be saving money by changing their spark plugs and you are going to be left woefully behind."

Perhaps this is overly critical. There are some interesting trends that fall under the canopy of this fluttering phrase of a buzzword. That will be the topic of the article.