Paul Graham finally finds a common thread amongst the disparate elements of Web 2.0:
Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users. What do they all have in common? I didn’t realize they had anything in common till recently, which is one of the reasons I disliked the term ‘Web 2.0′ so much. It seemed that it was being used as a label for whatever happened to be new — that it didn’t predict anything.But there is a common thread. Web 2.0 means using the web the way it’s meant to be used. The ‘trends’ we’re seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble.