When I'm talking to clients, one of the things I really try and avoid doing is breaking out into Lingua Marketing. That very special language spoken by sales and marketing which can bamboozle the best of us. I don't like it and I don't think it's necessary. Even worse is when I see very cool ideas succumb to the perils of Lingua Marketing, I tend to get annoyed.

One such cool idea - more a collection of ideas really - is the concept of Web2.0.

Stripped of the thick layers of Lingua Marketing that have been applied over the last few years, the tools and concepts that make up Web2.0 can be seen to represent a revolution that's really been occuring since the early days of the web.

Tools such as podcasts and blogs have been around for a long time, predating Web2.0 by many years. People have been keeping diaries on line ever since HTML was developed, and even before then in the heady days of Bulletin Board Systems. Podcasts have been around long before the now ubiquous iPod was even a glint in Steve Jobs eye, what they were lacking was both a cool name (downloadable audio file just doesn't have that ring) and a universally acceptable update method.

So what's changed these two venerable concepts into leading lights of the Web2.0 cloud?

Simple, a change in thinking meeting an increasingly rapid technological advance. This is what Web2.0 to my mind really represents. Web2.0 is a way of giving people the ability to contribute to the information networks that we are building. Concepts such as wikis, social networking sites and so on all work towards building networks and information stores, which in turn brings us closer to that information economy everyone keeps talking about.

There have been recent announcements by the Federal Government about the need to develop Web2.0 tools for Government both internally and externally. Here's hoping that they're going to strip away the Lingua Marketing before they start.