Scott Rosenberg has also been blogging Web 2.0 and his view of this moment in the evolution of the web- as- a- business platform is instructive:
What we’re seeing is that a lot of the ideas and technologies that have incubated over the last couple of years, and have been showcased at places like the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, are now on the radar of the venture-capital world. Ideas for new web companies built around RSS syndication and blogs, wikis and social software, innovative search technologies and mobile applications are hatching. And once more we’re witnessing the strange, messy process by which the enthusiasms and ideas of technologists are packaged, streamlined, prettified, sometimes improved and sometimes wrecked, as business people struggle to figure out how to make them work for the general public – and how to make money from them.
In terms of the evolution of the Web as a collective human endeavor, this conference’s name is a little off – I’d say we’re on Web 6.0 or 7.0 by now, at least. But in terms of the evolution of the Web as a place for people to try to invest, for a lot of the people here – “scarred veterans,” as William Janeway just described them, of the turn-of-the-millennium speculative frenzy – I guess it feels like only the second time around.
He makes the Bubble 2.0 joke too, and points to Jeff Jarvis’s eventblogging at BuzzMachine as well as Jeremy Zawodny’s.