With so much written and told about Web 2.0 many people wonder whether this new buzzword is something worth worrying or even talking about. The issue becomes pressing since Web 3.0 is already underway.
In early postings of this blog I explained some of the aspects of this phenomenon and more specifically its effects on the market power structures. The issue seems to attract the attention of the academic community, there are already papers published about it and journals are getting interested, some already announcing special issues about the subject.
Web 2.0 attracts also plenty of attention in the blogosphere. Blogs like those of Nicholas Carr, Don Hinchcliffe, Andrew Keen, or blogs like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Micropersuation TechCrunch , Webware and hundreds of others but also online forums from serious and bona fide sources like Britannica, together with many books recently published have contributed to a very lively debate full of enthusiastic as well as critical remarks and arguments.
Next to that all kinds of marketing tools necessary for making this environment useful to marketers and marketing strategist are emerging: From search engines specialized on collecting the online customer murmur about brands and products to tools measuring the power of blogs and their potential as advertising tools.
In the next posts I will try to present some of my ideas on the matter: a definition of the term, the position of Web 2.0 in the marketing domain, the main types of applications and the ways this technologies are used by businesses as marketing tools.
As to the question / title of this post, I am not going to give any specific answer to it. I will leave the answer to the reader.
