Oh! Two dot Oh!

Newsweek knows it, and has made a lovely wordplay out of it ("Putting the 'We' in Web"). Bloggers fear it, or endear it, or simply always hear it. We should just embrace it and get over it. As much as everyone hates taglines and buzzwords, it is here. And despite pundits everywhere insisting that the 2.0 moniker actually means nothing, it does.

Saying that 2.0 is used because people want the buzz again, is true. Saying that 2.0 is just what 1.0 wanted to be, is true. Saying that hearing 2.0 makes you want to puke is.. well, understandable. Well, then puke. People with a sense of perspective, like Tim O'Reilly, don't find 2.0 so hard to understand. And why should it be ? 1.0 was primarily one-way, 2.0 is equally two-way. What's so hard about that ?

Things follow from that, obviously. Eddies of complexity will appear and are doing so. Great ! Flickr, mySpace, Digg. Maybe it makes you giddy trying to classify everything at once, shoehorning things into a single cage. Then don't! Or if you insist, let the explanation be longer than one sentence.

It used to be 'the big three-oh' that everyone was afraid of. Now, the next generation is staring at two dot oh with equally frightful eyes.

Don't fret. Once you hit it, you'll see it's not painful at all.