There has been lot of discussion about what Web 2.0 really is, so we thought we’d use the power of Web 2.0 itself to come up with the answer, and here it is:

42.

Just kidding. What we actually did was take a look at all the tag data going back to February 2004 (the month of the first use of Web 2.0 as a tag on del.icio.us), and analyzed all the bookmarks and tags related to the term. We can report that as of October 31, 2005 there have been over 230,000 separate bookmarks and over 7,000 unique tags associated with the term ‘Web 2.0’ by del.icio.us users. So for this exercise, we lopped off the really long tail and normalized some similar terms (e.g. combining blog, blogs, and blogging), and came up with this snapshot of what Web 2.0 REALLY is – at least according to del.icio.us users' most popular tags through the end of October 2005:

Other notable tags included rubyonrails (1.8%), del.icio.us (1.6%), folksonomy (1.4%), community (1.1%), wiki (.9%), flickr (.8%), free (.7%), trends (.6%), flock (.4%) and googlemaps (.3%).

So there you have it - interesting, but it still seems to fall short of a definitive answer. Maybe the blinding flash of the obvious is that Web 2.0 is best defined as arguing about what Web 2.0 is really about.