Talk:O'Reilly Media/Archives/2019
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False Claims
This article falsely claims that Dale Dougherty invented the term "Web 2.0" when it was in common usage years earlier (see Wikipedia article on Web 2.0.) You could perhaps make an argument that Dougherty popularized the term (although I would argue against it) but you certainly can't say he came up with it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.45.108.197 (talk) 21:17, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
Response from Tim O'Reilly: Neither Dale Dougherty nor I were aware at the time that anyone had previously used the term. Saying that "Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly decided to use the term "Web 2.0" coined in January 1999 by Darcy DiNucci" is just false. The events described in my article "What is Web 2.0" [1] are an accurate reflection of our thought process at the time: "The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense?"
Darcy DiNucci's 1999 article [2] is cited as the source of the term, but the article was little read, and used the term with a completely different meaning. Not only we, but few others, had ever heard of it. It was only dug up years after the fact by some zealous wikipedian. It would be reasonable to say "The term had been used previously in a different sense by Darcy Dinucci in a 1999 article, but it had never caught on, and neither Dougherty nor O'Reilly were aware of it when they named the Web 2.0 Summit."
While Google Trends only goes back to 2004, when we first introduced the term, you can see that its rise is almost entirely coincident with our introduction and use of it. (See [3])