Jen Pahlka of CMP, our co-producer on the Web 2.0 Conference, just sent a pointer to an Advertising Age article noting that Web 2.0 was the most cited Wikipedia article of the year, beating out such pop-culture topics as Steve Irwin, Mark Foley, and Snakes on a Plane, as well as other tech topics like blog, Ajax, and RSS.
And I have to say, the Wikipedia article on Web 2.0 is indeed pretty darn good, so I just incremented that link count by one… (But do still read my own What is Web 2.0? :-)
Despite all the debate about whether the name is or is not useful, which seems to crop up with some regularity in comments on this blog, it has indeed captured something important about the zeitgeist of the time. And I do think that the fundamental ideas of Web 2.0 are indeed important for any startup in today’s network-oriented marketplace. As I keep telling people, it’s not just about the web, it’s about the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. And that insight, and the lessons of consumer web companies, can be applied to applications increasingly distant from the consumer web.