I’ve included two semi-obscure pieces of jargon in that title, despite Jakob’s good advice that ‘Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog…’. One of those pieces of jargon is easy to define, and the other isn’t.

To start with the easy, according to Wikipedia ‘[the phrase is used] in discussions on computer technology, where someone who is a staunch advocate for a particular technology is described as having “drunk the Kool-Aid”.‘ The phrase has rather tragic roots, but I won’t go into that here.

The second phrase I need to define is much tougher. Using the term ‘Web 2.0′ in conversation, will quite reasonably lead to the question ‘what’s web 2.0?’. I’ll try to answer that here: Web 2.0 is a made up name for a whole broad range of ill defined technologies, practices and trends going on in the web world right now. There’s probably an even split between people who think it’s useful, if broad, term and people who think it’s pointless, empty hype-ridden junk. I didn’t even come close to defining it did I? Personally I like either ‘the read/write web’ (meaning the ‘new’ web is really about easy communication between real people, not just broadcast). I suggest the Wikipedia definition (or list of possible definitions) if you’re interested.

Personally I fall kind of between the two camps, with a feeling that there’s probably something in web 2.0 but it’s not quite clear what that is yet. But this post is more about kool-aid drinking than about web 2.0.

Here’s the anecdote (every good post should have one): Recently in conversation with Aimee, my significant other, I said ‘I was just looking at photos tagged jello on Flickr.’, Aimee’s response was ‘what are tags, what’s Flickr?’. For a web geek not knowing what tags and Flickr are is kind of like being puzzled by the terms jumping and circus. That brought it home pretty abruptly, just because I’m drinking the web kool-aid doesn’t mean the rest of the world is. To answer the actual questions, Flickr is the photo sharing tool of choice for geeks and tags are kind of like categories for content, but they’re user-make-upable not top-down defined.

The point here, if I have one, is something about realising that the things that are second-nature to you may well mean nothing at all to nearly everyone else in the world. Technology people could particularly benefit from keeping that in mind.

See: Darren Barefoot’s more concise and statisticed post on the web kool-aid.