Web geeks need to practice the art of plain speaking

Net Results: I have a theory that the amount of resistance put up by the corporate sphere to a new technology or a new tech concept, and the length of time it will take the mainstream business world to adopt any such tool, is directly proportionate to how stupid the name for the new technology or concept is.

Evidence for my theory includes: wiki, blog, mashups, Web 2.0. Oh dear.

These may all cut ice among the digirati/technorati - those who could in the past be conveniently categorised as the tech trendoids who religiously read Wired magazine, back when it was annoyingly but often brilliantly cool rather than, as it is now, navel-gazingly irrelevant. But such terminology is a major barrier to mainstream adoption for businesses. It is the tech equivalent of body piercings, magenta hair, miniskirts and manbags. In other words, not in the boardroom, please.

Now I know the whole Web 2.0 thing - the catch-all term for hyper-interactive net technologies such as wikis, blogs and mashups - is supposed to be the buzzword du jour in Silicon Valley. Goodness, there have even been conferences organised around the topic, which means it is pinging the semi-mainstream radar somewhere.

Readers may even be familiar with the kerfuffle that occurred when Cork networking organisation IT@Cork set up a half-day conference called, simply, "Web 2.0 Half Day Conference", which took place yesterday. As my colleague John Collins reported last week, US technology book publishers and conference organisers O'Reilly sent the group a "cease and desist" letter claiming it had a pending trademark on the term Web 2.0 (though they didn't send one to Enterprise Ireland when it did the same).

To me, it all sounds a bit like those silly patent claims on "one click shopping" or "the idea of a hyperlink" that some tech giants thought they'd try on at various points.

This whole snafu was first revealed on Irish blogger Tim Raftery's weblog, where one commentator noted: "Personally, I hope no one ever uses the term 'Web 2.0' ever again, but that's just me."

No, it's me, too, and plenty more. I am sure there's a small standing army of us, those who - even if we use or produce them ourselves - feel foolish every time we have to say a word like "blog" or "wiki" to another sentient adult.

"Wiki" is truly horrible. Yes, I know (now, after reading the Wikipedia of course) that "wiki" is a perfectly respectable Hawaiian word that means quick or fast, and I know it comes from the Wiki Wiki bus line that runs at Honolulu International Airport, although the connection between a bus line and a collaborative web page technology still doesn't quite gel for me.

But I hate using the term because it sounds so silly, like a nickname for a particularly annoying, yappy little lapdog. Or the word a prim adult might use with a child to refer to a very personal part of the human anatomy.

And Web 2.0 is just painful. It makes me want to scream. I hate the implied inner-circularity of the phrase - if you don't know what it refers to you, clearly, are "out", not "in". You aren't as "with it" as those people over there (perhaps the ones with the body piercings?) and your general coolness is at low ebb.

As a term, it is flippant, far too self-conscious, tries too hard and generally makes you inclined to slap its face, if only it had one. One of its problems is that it is so hard to define.

It is one of those "kinda" phrases - as in, "Web 2.0 kinda refers to all those social technologies, right? Like MySpace, like blogs, like wikis; like the kinda stuff bloggers spend lots of blogspace in the blogosphere discussing among themselves then trying hard to convince the rest of us that it is hugely 'socially relevant' and will change the world".

The frustrating thing for me is that so many of these technologies and concerns are important. But too many self-important people try to sell them to the corporate world. And they try to sell them using all these silly names the poor technologies are burdened with. Blogs and wikis - they are like those appallingly named celebrity babies, the Apples and Tiger Lilies and Brooklyns that I'm sure are perfectly nice offspring but will carry a lifelong burden of alarming nomenclature.

All of which is why, when SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann was asked during a press conference in Paris last week if the company was making use of or considering incorporating Web 2.0 technologies, he was both dismissive and seemingly a bit bemused.

Instead of answering this quite interesting question - surely a company that designs software intended to lace organisations together more productively would be examining the potential of blogs and wikis, for example - he batted it away.

We got a rambling and irrelevant reply that boiled down to an opinion that blogs need to be better edited and bloggers should be more responsible as, right now, it's Wild West in the blogosphere.

And that I fear is how much of the corporate world, especially those corporates with the ability to proselytise for new technologies, will continue to view Web 2.0 and its tools and technologies for some time to come.

So here's an idea. Let's ditch Web 2.0. Let's talk about something immediately understandable such as the collaborative web (or as a BusinessWeek writer suggests in a recent piece on Web 2.0, "the live web").

A little less of the glib pseudo-branding and a bit more plain talking would surely benefit everybody.