These days, it seems that people are talking about Web 2.0 more than ever. Many sites that I visit everyday just changed their design recently to look more Web 2.0, and the number of new web applications is booming.

There are just too many things going on that it can be hard for someone to know what Web 2.0 really is… I am myself sometimes confused and wondering where’s the limit between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It’s true that some people seem to consider Web 2.0 as the use of the AJAX language only or to community sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. There are actually more elements that define the new Web and some people are trying to help people understand this new era.

Dion Hinchcliffe tries to give a definition of Web 2.0 and seems to be complaining about the confusion amongst people when it comes to define what Web 2.0 is. He wrote an article yesterday called: You know you’re Web 2.0 when… , a very interesting and comprehensive piece of paper where he tries to help people see if they’re Web 2.0 or not.

Here’s his Web 2.0 checklist:

• You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
• You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
• Your Web page doesn’t reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
• You are actively aware of other users’ recent activity on a site.
• It’s possible for you to easily share with others the information you’re contributing on the Web site.
• You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
• You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
  
• There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
• You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
• There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
• Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
• The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.

That’s a very comprehensive list. That doesn’t mean that every site should respect all these elements, but this is a good list to understand if you are close to Web 2.0 or not… Hmmm, I think my blog misses a few web 2.0 things: should I add tags or links to social bookmarking sites? 🙂