I’ve been using the term Web 2.0 in conversations since last year but secretly I felt like a jerk when I did so because I wasn’t entirely sure what the heck it meant. I read the O’Reilly white paper “What is Web 2.0” and knew it had something to do with web sites that interact with people and gather information about them and where people added content to the site and made it more valuable as they added more and more content. That’s pretty vague though, I know.

But in the last few weeks I’ve gotten some real clarity about what Web 2.0 means. Web 2.0 is based on abstract concepts like: use the web to offer a service instead of software; address “the long tail” instead of just the head; leverage customer self-service and algorithmic data management to create a tailored experience; co-develop content with users; and use unique and hard-to-recreate databases to drive the business. These are now more than just abstract ideas; here’s what made those ideas come alive for me.

I’ve been very busy lately and I like to listen to music while I work. But I’m no good at creating iPod playlists and when I’m involved in my work it seems like a CD only lasts a short time and then there is silence and I have to stop what I’m doing, get up and select another CD. And I have a tendency to play the same small collection of CDs over and over again. I needed my own private DJ who would learn my tastes and then play a mix of tunes I would like.

Then I found a web site called Pandora. Pandora streams music over the Internet for free and allows me to create “radio stations” that each play a different type of music depending on what I’m in the mood for. They can do this because for the last seven years a group of musicologists has been analyzing and cataloging tens of thousands of songs in an undertaking they call The Music Genome Project. They have tagged each song with hundreds of characteristics such as the tempo, tonality, instruments used, vocals, etc.

I type in the name of a band or a song I like and Pandora creates a station by that name and starts creating a playlist by lining

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