The New News24. 1.9ish? What is that?

I started off this post, thinking I was going to expose the new 24.com for cheating a 2.0ish feel. Our lead techie back at the office suggested as such. But I took one look at the code... and I'm NO CODER. If you see the word AJAX popping up all over the place... If it walks like ajax, talks like ajax - chances are? It's ajax.

I digress. Change of direction. I am but very impressed with the new 24.com - there's a lot of partial page refresh (being able to change stuff on a page without completely refreshing it), and that makes it very 2.0ish (in my personal definiton). The use of tabs enables a lot of information to be layered - a much better content proposition than the shotgun "splatter it everywhere" approach.



Next step I reckon, is to cookiefy it, so you can save your favourite tabs settings... Or perhaps you can already. I haven't registered.

It does raise an interesting point... Just what is bloody web 2.0? Is it a code platform, a thought platform, a design platform or an intangible movement? Can you design some rounded boxes and some floating div thingies (my techies told me to say that) and call yourself web 2.0?

I'm not sure. And when you're not sure - you turn to collective intelligence.

As used by its proponents, the phrase "Web 2.0" can also refer to one or more of the following:

* The transition of Web sites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming computing platforms serving web applications to end-users

*A social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and "the market as a conversation"

*Enhanced organization and categorization of content, emphasizing deeplinking
A rise or fall in the economic value of the Web, possibly surpassing the impact of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s

Hmmm. Collective intelligence is waffling slightly. I scroll down.

The complex and evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-based browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications. These differing but complementary approaches provide Web 2.0 with information-storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected of web-sites.

A Web 2.0 website may typically feature a number of the following techniques:

*Rich Internet application techniques, optionally Ajax-based
*CSS
*Semantically valid XHTML markup and the use of Microformats
*Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom
*Clean and meaningful URLs
*Extensive use of folksonomies (in the form of tags or tagclouds, for example)
*Use of wiki software either completely or partially...
*Use of Open source software either completely or partially...
*Weblog publishing
*Mashups
*REST or XML Webservice APIs

Sounds very techie. I guess the answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. If you're doing technology for a broader purpose, on a volume model using next generation technology... and being clever about it. You probably deserve a 2.0 tag.

I wonder if this opens a gap for an official definition. And an official association to award official badge certification. Anyone up for it?