Web 2.0 allows users to combine and share content in new ways, emphasizes user participation and user-generated content, and enables two-way interaction and communication between users on the web. It represents a shift to more social and collaborative applications of the web where people can both consume and produce information. Experts define Web 2.0 by features like social networking sites, user reviews, media sharing, blogging, and the ability for rich collaboration between users.

1. What is Web 2.0 ?

2. Insights from 20 Web2.0 influencers

3. ‘ The atomization of the Web..… taking all the components and making them available so that people can combine them in ways that you never would have considered’ Max Mancini, EBay

4. ‘ a continuing evolution of the ability to inexpensively get information, data and now entertainment out to the consumer and the business world Alan Meckler, Internet.Com

5. ‘ It’s really about the user. It’s about creating a user controlled experience and leveraging the end user to created added value’ Eric Engleman, Bloglines

6. ‘ It’s about giving people the freedom to create’ Gina Bianchini, Ning

7. ‘ an emphasis on the notion of a people powered web …one person can now communicate with a mass audience’ Dorion Carroll, Technorati

8. ‘ It was a kind of ‘read-only web’ prior to this movement…. And it’s becoming a really great web where the interaction is two-way’ Raju Vegesna, Zoho

9. ‘ If I had to define it, it would be social sites, and social networks such as MySpace and Facebook. But also user generated content such as You Tube’ Richard McManus, Read/Write Web

10. ‘ Web 2.0 is an application platform, and vendor and device neutral one…. Web2.0 revolution is the platform shift that I’ve been waiting for all my life’ TJ Kang, ThinkFree

11. ‘ I see Web2.0 as course correction. It re-establishes the relationships we have in the offline world, puts them in the online world and enables group consumption to happen again’ Patrick Crane, LinkedIn

12. ‘ One aspect is user generated content ,where the public is now interested in contributing content to the Internet as a public good, which is different than in the past when consumers were just consuming content’ Shaun Walker, DotNetNuke

13. ‘ It’s the growing realisation that the Web is increasingly a social environment and that people are using it to communicate with one another, like they’ve always done, but in such an open way.’ Biz Stone, Twitter

14. ‘ I think at a very broad level, it is the interactive web.’ Seth Sternberg, Meebo

15. ‘ I think its an artifact of the economic conditions of the ability for people to take a passion in a topic, and actually implement something’ Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us

16. ‘ the ability for the web to connect people and enable collaboration’ Ranjith Kumarin,YouSendIt

17. ‘ Web 2.0 is much more interactive. Sites with participation from users, and there community elements to it with things like profiles, ratings and user generated content’ Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon

18. ‘ The resurgence of web innovation after the dot com bust in 2002, in great part triggered by technology and the critical mass of broadband users’ Rodrigo Maclanes, Skype

19. ‘ It is the intersection of social changes, economic changes and technology changes- that’s what makes Web 2.0 elusive; it hasn’t been about one technology’ Rod Smith, IBM

20. ‘ It’s the social constructs; the bidirectional communication that Web 2.0 enables – things that create or give the end user the ability to communicate back to the people running the software’ Tim Harris, Microsoft

21. ‘ Web 2.0 is the Internet based on the culture of contribution’ Tim Bray, Sun

22. ‘ It’s about giving control back to the user and leveraging that infrastructure that we built with ‘Web1.0’ to enable extremely rich experiences’ Michele Turner, Adobe

23. Quotes from ‘Web 2.0 Heroes’ by Bradley L Jones (Wiley Publishing, 2008)