The essential difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content, while any participant can be a content creator in Web 2.0… Users are first class entities in the system…

I’ve been working steadily on a post the past few days and it’s just about ready to be published. It’s on a pretty amazing Web 2.0 app called Sprout. While working on it, I was thinking about the idea of Web 2.0 in general and realized that I dedicated a blog to something that I never bothered to define. In fact, two of my first three posts weren’t even technically about Web 2.0 services or applications. Here is the circular logic – Is Web 2.0 only a buzzword, thus making it impossible to define simply because it doesn’t really exist as a tangible product, or is the fact that it has been applied to just about everything on the net make it impossible to accurately describe?

As luck would have it, I found a great research article on del.icio.us this morning that is dedicated to the concept of Web 2.0. Written by Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy, it attempts to define Web 2.0 – its characteristics, and its differences from the web pre-2003 (what can loosely be called “Web 1.0″). It gets a little technical in regards to how content and usage can be measured, but overall, the piece is a great start for anyone who is unsure about Web 2.0.

The article is located here. I’d love to hear your comments!