What the heck is "Web 2.0"? The concept goes way beyond media, but it will affect media: take the separation of content and container to the extreme, let everyone start interchanging the parts, and you've got it.
Here's a great video look at how we got here.
If you still want to dig into the concept more deeply, read on:
The T-shirts handed out at the Web 2.0 Expo in April in San Francisco read “Web 2.0 is ....” followed by 
a blank space to write in “user-generated” answers. Cute, but probably the best way to treat a term that groups a raft of disparate but related developments from the past five years or more into a buzzword for a new bubble.
That's no reason to dismiss it, however. Because those developments have produced a Web that's increasingly atomized into inter-operable parts that can be reassembled into countless new configurations. With the Web as platform, applications separate from data, and users shaping both, the possibilities are virtually limitless. As with the first bubble, more companies will fail than succeed, but not before another seismic shift has occurred. When the way people exchange information fundamentally changes, it affects a lot of things, including politics.
There is a lot more punditry about Web 2.0 out there, but here are some of the characteristic tools and ideas being lumped under that umbrella, some new and some rooted in the early days of the Internet:
- Social media – The trend that has received the most press, with countless sites like Flikr and Digg tapping users to improve the value of data by contributing, ranking, editing, distributing. Now new frontiers for collaboration: a Utah legistator used a wiki to open the process of a bill going from committee to floor. Can a community of experts benefit from the wisdom of crowds?
- Syndication – Some types of publishers are starting to find the majority of their audience interacting with their content on other websites. Widgets are the new standard tool after video syndication and RSS feeds; we need all three.
- Mashups – Have come a long way since someone put the San Francisco Craig's List apartment listing on Google Maps - Now they are penetrating businesses and getting toeholds in government. With rich mapping software and new data aggregators, this offers huge potential for our social and political scientists.
- The Long Tail - If you have a technology that makes it easy and cheap to reach all the people who like documentary films, you may have just created an aggregate market that's as big as the one for the number 1 blockbuster.
- Open outsourcing – The web services business model has come into its own, with vendors offering services through completely open APIs (interfaces) that allow you to access your data however you want, and often pay-as-you-go. Examples: Salesforce for CRM; Amazon for Web hosting and some applications; even Google whose free tools are now a realistic alternative to Microsoft Office for a small organization.
- Rapid application development - Ajax is everywhere, and Ruby on Rails is the most popular development framework. Contrast the traditional software development cycle with developers at Flikr who have been known to build and push out new applications 30 mins apart, testing user reaction, then modifying.
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