I dislike jargon. It’s a silly human invention that generally doesn’t mean anything to anybody apart from marketing people trying to sell to the idiocracy. “Web 2.0″ is a term that has grated on me for some time, and I’ve decided it needs to be fired from our vocabularies. “Web 2.0″ means just about as much to me as “It’s got electrolytes.” I disagree with the claim that somehow the web magically upgraded itself into a miraculous landscape where people could finally interact with and create content.

This week I created my very first LOL on icanhascheezburger, the original home of stupid pictures of cats that are, for reasons inexplicable, like heroin for the funnybone. Technically this should be classified as a classic act of Web 2.pwnage, as I took a user uploaded image and captioned it with my very own pithy quip:

This is nothing new. I could rattle off a list of human creations that contained the various elements of Web 2.0: user generated content, user response, ordinary people sharing their lives with millions of viewers, and companies being able to profit while allowing the spontaneity and freedom of unscripted response. In fact, I can think of somthing that did all that and pre-empted Web 2.0 by fifty years:

Yep, The Newlywed Game. The show where people from real life were featured on television, asked questions sent in by users, and shared responses that were unscripted by the hosting entity. This is just one example, but if you think about it, the concepts of Web 2.0 are really just the Internet being introduced to human social customs related to communication and entertainment for thousands of years. Don’t believe that user-generated content and tagging images existed prior to the Intarwebz? Ever been to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show?

My cynicism always kicks in when some awesome new label is introduced. Even more so when it quickly becomes obvious that the purpose of that label is not to perform a helpful function but to simply sell crap to people who probably don’t understand the slogan in the first place. That’s probably why it’s been identified as a pretty much useless term as a marketing device. But people in the industry keep on using it. Maybe the Silicon Valley is a little insulated from the real world. Or maybe some marketers just really believe stupid slogans like “It’s got electrolytes” sound fantastic.

Nobody cares about Web 2.0. They just care about the Web. It is possible to retire this term. It doesn’t have to be like Disco Demolition Night, but we can just say it: Web 2.0 is Dead.