Here's another view:

Web 2.0 is white hot at the moment, and not just because of the hype, but because of the insane amount of stuff that's being built for it right now. I know, I know. It sounds like the Cluetrain Manifesto all over again. Well, it kinda is.  Except that it's actually happening today all over the place and you can use it now (see BaseCamp, BackPack, del.icio.us, Flickr, Kiko, DropCash, Meebo, AjaxOffice, Bindows and dozens of others if you're not sure.) Of course, VCs have latched onto Web 2.0 big time and that's fueling fears of a new bubble. But this only obscures the real value in it. I've been closely examining O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme map and it really is a set of interlocking, reinforcing concepts. The more I study the Web 2.0, the more I realize this visualization is key.

• Leveraging The Long Tail. Amazon and eBay used this idea to build companies worth billions and billions. This is how. Web 2.0 provides both the audience and the services.
• Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. Monolithism is dead, we can't build big stuff like that any more. It's not agile nor can what you build be aggregated, deliver sustained value, or even survive for long.
• Self-Service and Participation. Fostering this lets you capture new value in your Web 2.0 apps 24 hours a day. Examples: Tagging, ranking, trackbacks, reputations.
• Radical Decentralization. Single sources of function are single sources of failure and are unacceptable now. And they don't scale to either deliver or capture significant value.
• Trust becomes a critical service in the Web 2.0 platform (which is the entire Web). Leveraging Wikipedia entries, Google PageRanks, Amazon Reviews, del.icio.us bookmark counts, and many others makes collective trust a measurable, quantifiable, and so vitally, a reusable service in the Web 2.0 stack.
• Emergent Behavior. Your Web 2.0 functionality can be reused, remixed, aggregated, and syndicated and the resulting value reintegrated back into your application.

(Dion Hinchcliffe)

And, here's a simple presentation on one of the concepts, The Long Tail, from our friends at Salesforce. It's understandable and points at what's coming.

We'll be taking a closer look at a number of these constructs and how they apply to Recruiting and Staffing. It's important to remember that these concepts have global applicability far beyond the web. They are the building blocks of 21st Century enterprises, just as industrial models were the foundation of the way we currently do things.

- John Sumser