Back in late 2006, what started out as a New Year’s series of pre­dic­tions of sorts osten­si­bly became one of the most down­loaded, most con­tro­ver­sial, and most talked about doc­u­ments in the his­tory of my career.

It was in keep­ing with that annual Jan­u­ary tra­di­tion, where a plethora of blog­gers flood the Inter­net with their pre­dic­tions about online trends, emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies, Inter­net flops, grow­ing indus­tries, rumored takeovers, ad nauseum.

But I’m no futur­ist by any stretch. I’m a copy­writer by trade.

But I’ve seen some tremen­dous changes, mostly “behind the scenes,” and I wanted to join in the tra­di­tion. Par­tic­u­larly, I wanted to share not only some­thing I was pas­sion­ate about, but also some­thing I knew was going to affect online copy in sig­nif­i­cant ways.

Now that sev­eral years have passed, I’m astounded by how true my pre­dic­tions were…

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So what exactly is Web 2.0? I’m not an ana­lyst or some dot­com pun­dit. But being online since 1991 (or since 1982 if you con­sider bul­letin board ser­vices), I’ve wit­nessed enough to have a good grasp of what’s going on.

So here’s my perspective.

At the dawn of the Inter­net the web was pri­mar­ily a uni­di­rec­tional, one-​​way com­mu­ni­ca­tions process. The web was com­prised mostly of sta­tic web pages, filled with hyper­text and links. It was akin to the direct mail indus­try, only this time it was served up on a com­puter mon­i­tor rather than on a piece of paper.

In fact, web pages that worked the best, espe­cially in a direct mar­ket­ing con­text, were ads and saleslet­ters that closely mim­ic­ked the long-​​copy print saleslet­ters we often get in the mail.

For many years and until recently, this was true.

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