Meet Josh. Josh meet the Herd.
I'm no techie (IT support teams all over the world know this much is true) but I've found it really refreshing to read a techie blog which understands - no, champions - the fact that all the new exciting stuff in Web2.0 is really about people.
Read his 5 principles for social design here. There's loads more really smart and beautifully articulated where that came from, too.
Just take a moment to print the following lucid description of what 2.0 is really all about. Cut and paste it everywhere. And print it off and stick it above your desk, so you don't forget.
"It’s easy to assume that Web 2.0 is a technological revolution, with acronyms like RSS, APIs, Ajax, and XML floating around. However, I think though technology has a central role to play, the real revolution isn’t technological, it’s people-based. Web 2.0 is a social revolution.A common view is that technology drastically changes the way that we live. It does to an extent, but upon deeper inspection we observe that most of that change is actually gains in efficiency concerning things we already do and not really a change to our core activities: communicating, listening, watching, learning, comparing, contrasting. Our bodies haven’t changed much at all. But our expectations have. We want more, more, more. More of what we already have"
Hurrah for Josh.