How do you convince a business it needs Web 2.0 when you don’t believe in Web 2.0?

I hate the phrase Web 2.0, I have never made a secret of that. Even the people I work with know I think it's simply a media buzzword that has no real meaning. Well now I will be leading a team of people to officially investigate what Web 2.0 can do for us, both internally, and externally.

Am I the right person to be doing this? Am I in the right part of the business? Possibly, and traditionally speaking, no. But isn’t that part of the equation here? All the things available to us now mean there’s no single right place for this to sit in an organisation, unless you have only just built a team recently.

For just over a year now I have been tasked with looking at technologies out in the big bad world, and how we could make use of them. There have been a few hardware solutions I have put forwards, a few applications which could help save money, but by far the most common proposals involved web technologies.

Many of these technologies aren’t new anymore. Some have only just become popular. Some are still wearing the beta tag. But this is my point. Web 2.0 is not new, it’s just highlighting that there’s loads of new things for the masses who haven’t been paying attention for the last 5 years. And even now, things are still progressing, moving forwards, and always looking to innovate.

My head of service made a very good point though “you have to call it Web 2.0, because people don’t have time to devote to incremental updates”. In a way this is true, and having lived with my head in the clouds of technology for so many years now, I forget that to the majority of people need help in understanding why they should take these new things seriously.

So now I will be banging the drum of Web 2.0 and cringing every time I utter the phrase, just so that people pay attention. Even if they go away thinking this is a new product from PC World that will save our web based efforts, surely that’s better than nobody being interested. My salvation will be that people have taken notice, agreed with proposals for change, and let us do what is right.

Come on people, Web 2.0 is the way! Ewwwww I feel dirty.