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From the website What’s Web 2.0?:

How Do We Define Web 2.0?

Submitted by Will Pate on June 6, 2005

One of the reasons What’s Web 2.0? was started was the difficulty in defining exactly what Web 2.0 is. Is it a series of technologies, methodologies or best practices? We could use your help in defining what Web 2.0 is.

The people who started this site agree that for concepts of Web 2.0 to make sense to regular folks, businesspeople and investors, it needs explaination in terms which describe how it works and why it matters.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, the original definition started on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.

The Old Wikipedia Definition

“Web 2.0 defines a newer incarnation of the World Wide Web typified by the transition from the typical website hosting HTML/XHTML pages, to a platform that provides a point of presence (sometimes known as a Web portal), from which any of the following interactions may occur:

5. Exposure of WebDAV based resources and collections”

The New Wikipedia Definition:

Technical:

CSS and semantically valid XHTML markup

Un-obtrusive AJAX Techniques

Syndication of data in RSS/ATOM

Aggregation of RSS/ATOM data

Clean and meaningful URLS

Support posting to a weblog

RESTian (preferred) or XML Webservice APIs

Some social networking aspects (share your data with friends, etc)

General:

The site should not act as a “walled garden” - it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.

Users should own their own data on the site

Purely web based - most succesful web 2.0 sites can be used almost entirely through the browser

Roland Tanglao has his own definition, which is less technical than either of the Wikipedia definitions.

Clean URLs (ampersands, questions marks, etc. are not needed in the URLs of any “page” on any website)

Standards based code (CSS, HTML, XHTML etc). This enables machine processing of the website as well as accessibility (although of course accessibility doesn’t come automatically from using standards based code!)

Syndication using RSS, Atom or any other standard syndication format

Aggregation using RSS, Atom or any other open standard syndication format

Clean Interfaces and APIs to get data in and out of the site

Dynamic:

Easy to update without any technical knowledge of CSS, HTML, etc.

A Refined Definition of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a series of best practices that create value greater than the sum of its parts. Web 2.0 is a distributed platform. Companies are using that platform to build powerful web services and ordinary people are using it to share and remix media.

Dynamic publishing without having to know HTML

Easy subscription to content updates for users

Notify other sites of updates

Pull in content from other sources

Plug in other powerful web services

Present intuitive interfaces

Clean URLs

Help search engines understand your content

Make design changes easier

So how would you define Web 2.0? (Clearly we’re just getting started).