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AJAXWorld Magazine publisher Jeremy Geelan writes: When Web 2.0 Journal editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe asked recently 'Is 'Web 2.0' Really About the Web, or Us?' he touched a vein. Peter Thoeny, founder TWiki.org and StructuredWikis, joins the discussion.

"Is Web 2.0 really about the Web, or us?" Hinchliffe wrote. "The rise of architectures of participation, which make it easy for users to contribute content, share it -- and then let other users easily discover and enrich it --  is central to Web 2.0 sites like MySpace, YouTube, Digg, and Flickr. But this is still just another aspect in the way that we, ourselves, have changed the way we use the Web.?

Hinchcliffe reminded his readers: "Not only have we gained 950 million new Internet users in the last ten years, but a great many of them use the Internet differently now too, with a hundred million of them or more directly shaping the Web by building their own places on the Web with blogs and 'spaces,' or by contributing content of virtually infinite variety."

But the real crux of Hinchcliffe's point came later in the essay:

"Power and control is shifting to the new creators.  As the users of the Web produce the vast majority of content (and soon, even software), they are therefore in control of it.  This shift of control has enormous long-term consequences since the Internet tends to route right around whatever central controls try to be applied.  The implications for traditional organizations are fascinating and will only increase as the MySpace generation heads into the workplace in large numbers."

It is for this last-named reason, perhaps, that the entire Fall technology conference season is dominated by "Web 2.0" issues, from AJAXWorld Conference & Expo next month (October 2-4, Santa Clara Convention Center) to the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference the following month. As what Hinchcliffe calls "the MySpace generation" becomes the rule in the US workplace and not the exception, Web 2.0 takes on a whole new significance.

But one has only to look at a recent Financial Times article to know that the public understanding of "Web 2.0" is still relatively minimal. Just as the adoption of RSS net-wide is still only about 10%, so it is apparently considered absolutely fine by a world-class newspaper like the FT to publish a piece ("The mashups that let comapnies get creative with data") riddled with curious "near-miss" statements about Web 2.0, such as defining AJAX as "asynchronous JavaScript" with no mention of XML let alone of the  XMLHttpRequest object

The Fall conference season, by producing (as it will) a ripple effect of newspaper, magazine, and online coverage about "Web 2.0" from every conceivable perspective, will mark in my view a definitive watershed in the general public's use of and understanding of Web 2.0. The only question now remains: will that understanding be a commercialized, corrupted version of the Next-Generation Web or will it be truer to Hinchcliffe's vision -- reflected in the title of The New New Internet conference he is championing and co-producing -- of a Web characterized by the rise of architectures of participation, which - argues Hinchcliffe - make it easy for users to contribute content, share it --  and then let other users easily discover and enrich it.

"It's like a large door has been opened behind us and everyone is now just getting a sense of that it's there and where it leads," Hinchcliffe comments.

Peter Thoeny, founder TWiki.org and StructuredWikis LLC, was kind enough to join the discussion. "Tim Berners-Lee actually envisioned the web to be a read-write media," Thoeny notes. "The little known HTTP PUT and DELETE methods are almost never used (for security reasons), but they would allow people to share content. Now we have wikis that enable this in a secure way."

Then he adds, for those puzzled by his reference to wikis as being secure:

"Secure in a sense where the community is policing itself, 'soft security;' whereas in pre-wiki days, the system has to take care of access control."

"Collective content creation is spreading quickly on the web," Thoeny continues. "The latest example is Wired News' "Veni, Vedi, Wiki" article that was edited by the wiki community on a wiki. It was largely a success, unlike the failed Los Angeles Times 'wikitorial,' a collaboratively written editorial, that had to be pulled down soon after it went live because it was being flooded with inappropriate material."

Thoeny adds:

"Wikis are taking off not just on the web, but also behind corporate firewalls. Google, Yahoo, Motorola, Sun and more run large wikis of 50K and more pages. Corporate wikis are largely powered by TWiki , but many other wiki engines used as well, such as SocialText, Confluence and MediaWiki. As we have seen from our book interview on "wikis in the workplace" , wikis historically get deployed in a grassroot manner; they get consolidated into a large corporate wiki once they are at the radar screen of the CTOs and CIOs."

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