When I first heard of the web in ’95, I thought a lot about the consequences of networking the computers sat on every desk. I heard talk of how that virtual-proximity would remove barriers to information-flow and leverage many hands to make light work of large problems, how new communities would form and ideas be exchanged. All of this was true but not nearly as much I expected.

For most people, the true potential of online communities is something they read about only in the Sunday newspapers. Dave Winer may be sought out by readers in every village he visits but for most people it takes years to reach out in even a city and retirees and young mothers find themselves sometimes unbearably lonely once isolated from those physical networks.

For the majority of people, the human-networking potential of Web1.0 never emerged. Everyone uses the web but ask most people what they do with it and they’ll tell you that they use it for shopping, email, research and news. For the man in the street, the internet revolution was arguably less of a revolution than an evolution.

Web1.0 explored what was possible when we took out the human middle-man and allowed our computers to connect direct to computers and data in other networks. It was about what became financially and technically possible when we no longer needed a remote operator in order to interface with a remote machine or a physical network to deliver remote information.

That’s not to say that machines couldn’t communicate before ‘95. Be it counting handle-turns or pulses of light, machines have always had a language of interaction. Nonetheless, the creation of one common language (or triumvirate of languages) lowered the barriers sufficiently to mean more people and machines chose to connect. At the same time, servers allowed those machines to safely expose useful data from their vulnerable interiors to the world at large. More information and lower barriers created more entrants, more entrants created more still and Web1.0 cascaded into existence.

Humans have always been able to communicate and network but when we look to our virtual networks, the lockin of email and the hassle of publishing and reading has kept most of them ultra-private and defensive. Those defence mechanisms are so strong we will sooner reject an email from a friend than let risk spam and even when we want to, we will sooner sit in alone and in silence than chance an interaction with a stranger.

Humans are the network that Web2.0 connects and RSS is the common language. RSS is to conversation what TCP/IP was to data and blogs are to humans what server-software was to computers. We have always been able to communicate but RSS makes it that little bit easier and more reliable. RSS lowers our threshold to reading and hence raises our audience for writing whilst blogging allow us to put a little bit of our sensitive data outside our personal firewalls and to give others something to interact with. We all start to realise that giving a little of ourselves can bring far more in return. More interaction breeds more ideas and RSS and aggregators give those ideas a network they’ve never before known.

TCP/IP was DNA for data on a network, it charted its delivery and guaranteed its integrity. XML and RSS are fast becoming the DNA for ideas on a network. Words become nucleotides, items become genes and just as with real genes, we are the vehicle to take the best of them to the next generation. Some survive, some multiply, some will be lost and some will never get read but one way or another, RSS lets them evolve faster than fruit flies.

The blogosphere is the detailed transcription of an entire population’s intellectual DNA, an exhaustive textual, audio and video description of the ideas and emotions of a community. The blogosphere and what it will evolve into become not just the zeitgeist but the very definition of the human state. If the handbook for the revolution is Surowiecki’s excellent “The Wisdom of Crowds” then note that the blogosphere is the crowd - ignore its wisdom at your peril.

Where Web1.0 allowed us to connect to remote computers without an analogue call centre worker, Web2.0 allows us to connect to remote people without an analogue journalist. Despite what’s bandied around this don’t mean we’ll dispose of all journalists and publications any more than online news meant we disposed of newspapers. There will be change for sure but good journalists add value far beyond the information they transcribe and those who think it’s all change are more naïve than those who believe it’s none.

Some argue that Web2.0 really isn’t an event - it’s incremental and undeserving of a name. In some ways they’re right. 2005 and “Web2.0” isn’t where rich human networking started any more than 1995 and the “Information Super-Highway” were where computer networking started.

“Web 2.0” applications were around long before today. EBay was 2.0 and so were Citeseer, Friends Reunited and P2P. Spam email may have been 1.0 but the “I love you virus” is 2.0. Amazon isn’t a 2.0 company but its reader reviews were. Page rank wasn’t a Web2.0 application though auctioning Adwords certainly was.

So what is it that makes Web2.0 a big deal? It’s a big deal because people say it’s a big deal. Lots of people. Lots of people are blogging, lots of people are tagging and the number grows almost exponentially. When a lot of people do something one month and twice as many people do it the next month, it makes it a big deal. The participation in Web2.0 has grown well beyond the founders-circle and shows no signs of slowing down.

And why give it a name? Well when lots of incremental things start happening in a short space of time and when those incremental things build into a qualitative change of state we need a way to distinguish the new one from the old one. Web2.0 seems a very apt descriptor for where we are about to arrive.

Tagging and blogging are the poster children of 2.0 and it’s interesting that many still dismiss them as they dismissed the directories and homepages of ’94. A few years ago they would have been credible. Not today though. Today there is too much noise from too many directions and too many demographics.

The bloggers of today aren’t scouts looking for water and flatlands, those pioneers came and settled back in the late nineties. Those that you see now are the forward party of a full blown caravan and land is being settled. There’s a city being built and I imagine that anyone who doesn’t settle right now will soon be unable to afford the land they stand on.

Web 1.0 was about connecting machines. Web 2.0 is about connecting humans. For my money, when it comes to interaction, human beats machine every time and my work, my emotions and my livelihood are all staked on Web 2.0 being a very Big Deal.