I spoke on  a panel at the Web 2.0 event hosted by TiE tonight. All in all a really interesting couple of hours, as always it’s a great opportunity to sit next to Ross Mayfield, Charlene Li, and Jeff Clavier and talk about these things.

On the drive back I had a couple of thoughts. First, there is much confusion about what web 2.0 actually is… a technology, a business model, software delivery, or an ideology. I don’t think I realized how disruptive these ideas are until I saw them play out in the audience.

Speaking of the audience, it was very interactive. One of the best comments was when someone piped up that “web 1.0 is people on a stage talking to an audience, web 2.0 is the audience talking to each other”. Perfect, the participation economy in action.

The one aspect of this event that probably created self-inflicted confusion was that we tried to talk about too broad a reach of topics under the web 2.0 meme. It’s pretty hard to focus on the concept of mashups when you are also introducing blogs/wikis, or talk about the signifigance of scripting and hosted software delivery at the same time.

Lastly, it was interesting to realize that many people in enterprise IT (whether a vendor or a practitioner) look at these technologies and say “what will they do for me” or “what new apps will I get” and that really misses a subtle point. Web 2.0 is, IMO, user initiated packaging of application services so the real question should be “what can I do with these technologies that nobody else is doing.”