Gosh, I've been doing Web 2.0 work all along...

The big thing to remember about Web 2.0 is that it's largely based on existing technologies, concepts and standards, with the real innovation evident in a revamped consciousness about the ultimate use of web applications. Considering my company's portfolio of subsystems within the grand umbrella of KUAM.COM I've been able to architect over the last six years, one can say we've been doing Web 2.0 work the whole time.

Consider the following notable achievements we've pulled off that are now mainstays of the Web 2.0 state of mind:

• Syndication - we started using RSS for news before it was cool to do so and hardly anybody knew what to do with it. I got tired of complaint e-mails from people who'd find my XML-based feeds, saying the page was broken or I was a lousy web developer. Now, the service is so ubiquitous, many of my services are RSS-accessible and have traffic exceeding that of my normal web hits.
  
• Social applications - Familiar Faces, our community image gallery, pre-dated MySpace, and got even more popular when we added subscribable Flickr-like photostreams for the entire gallery and for each member.
  
• Participatory journalism - we've had community contributions from Day 1, encouraging people to send in stories from their point of view, going beyond the normative OpEd column.
• Microformats - we tried, and ultimately failed, to use a proprietary system of metadata that would describe stories, exhibits, and galleries stored on our site as a means of improving multimedia search results, sharing and archival. When microformatting finally came around and caught the buzz, I was glad someone got it right.
  
• Multiplatform/multidevice access - we set the pace locally for mobile communications, developing content for wireless phones via WAP and PDAs and notification services over SMS. Now we're moving into handset-specific personalization and MMS.
  
• The Long Tail - we've been forging partnerships with major content producers for in-demand data since we launched, but we also knew the key to growing traffic would be reaching out to the smaller sites, too. We use datapush utilities to make our news portable to smaller personal homepages and little sites, and it's worked.
  
• Rich user experience - I started using server-based XMLHTTP calls through client-side to get data from external servers I controlled through remote ASP.NET processes read into ASP scripts on our web server. This was prehistoric Ajax in action. And this was back in the 2002 local elections to parse out voting tabulation results.
  
• Public APIs - I'd been encouraging people to reference a simple JavaScript process I wrote and maintained to get our headlines to appear on their sites, but then eventually threw together a library of web-callable methods early on, and they became a way for code-savvy webbies to get more granular control over the formatting of our content in their applications. This largely is prior to the mainstream advent of RSS.
• Remixing - it took awhile, but I finally found some college kids who went to the States and caught the dev bug and had them start to build new quirky (but still cool) apps using my stuff. I had to help them and a lot of the work was collaborative, but I got better at OOP and building secure, scalable, tiered, distributed systems because I had people outside my organization tapping my data.
  
• Sharing - a hallmark of our branding is letting people get the word out and tell others about what they found on our site. We've been giving away the world's most prozed asset - information - through video, articles and whatnot. This was a risk, as the retailing of such was a revenue stream for many years. But competitively and to keep up with the demands of the online community. Such a practice has grown into collaborative access for multimedia playlists, tag clouds for our search utility, and more.
  

So I guess when you look at it, it wasn't the fact that we put evolutionary concepts into production, but that we had the right attitude at the right time. The social engineering involved with introducing a new technological platform is always exponentially more difficult to manage than the technical engineering. We've been fortunate to have done it right both internally and with our audience.

Yay us.