You witnessed, were a victim of or have at least heard about the bursting of the dot com bubble in the fall of 2001. Fortunes that had been made overnight were lost overnight.

The sky was falling. It was a very scary time for a lot of people. Some said that the World Wide Web was just a flash-in-the-pan idea that had been over-hyped and that the crash was irrefutable proof of that fact.

There were, however, some survivors of the 2001 dot com bust. The survivors had a few important commonalities and there were those who insisted that the World Wide Web was more important than ever and had a very bright future indeed.

One of those who saw the results of the 2001 dot com bust as a glass half full rather than a glass half empty was a man by the name of Tim OReilly. OReilly (of OReilly Media) met with Dale Dougherty of Media Live International in 2004. Out of that meeting the term Web 2.0 was born.

The definition that Tim OReilly gives for Web 2.0 is: "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them."