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Um, what? Tim Berners-Lee's original vision was a read-write web, a participant network. And even the Internet and Arpanet that existed before the Web, served to connect academic and scientific communities.

Unfortunately, when the Web went commercial in the mid-nineties, corporate managers and marketers, couldn't immediately make the conceptual jump from “static” media like TV and magazines, to the social web. So we wound up with a commercial Web that was indeed a “repository for data” (ie, a bunch of flash and PDFs).

IM and Twitter are just IRC. MySpace is just a simplified UI for authoring HTML and emailing. World of Warcraft is a MUD with a nice graphics engine layered on top. The paradigms everyone is buzzing about are 20+ years old.

The only interesting thing about “Web 2″ is that the Fortune 500 are finally ready to adopt some of these “new” strategies, instead of just barfing out a new MTV Flash site every 6 months.

It seems to me that after 10 years of getting their asses handed to them by smaller companies run by people who actually got what the Web was meant to be used for, the marketing team have finally started to accept the obvious; and now they're trying to spin it as if they thought of the whole concept.

We've been talking recently about a panel for an upcoming conference on the theme of “next generation of foundational information channels”. Personally, too, I think the next generation of focus will be sorting things out by personal relevance and relationships — potentially quite tricky.

I think we've got a lot of iteration ahead of us before we have solid, ingrained (personal) info management strategies. (Hence my reluctance to assign any numbers, which solidly place moments on a continuum.)

And ultimately, I don't know that we'll have “one to rule them all”, but, perhaps, a set of neatly interchangeable tools so everyone can pick and choose what works for them.