Tim O'Reilly's Big Fat Head (2.0)

Apparently, Tim O'Reilly is in agreement [1] with his company's moves on trying to monopolize the Web 2.0 term. The worst part about this ordeal is that his company is acting as if we wouldn't have any term to call this whole next-generation web if it wasn't for his conference. I have news for you Tim, you didn't popularize the term, the people who spoke at your conference did. You didn't invent anything, you just came up with a catchy term to describe something that already happened and now you want to act like you own the concept.

You don't see Jesse James Garrett [2]  going around telling people that they can't write books, articles and blog posts about AJAX because he came up with the term. Why? Because unlike you, he understands that just because you come up with a catchy phrase for something that is already happening (and which, by the way, you hand no hand in creating) you have no right to act like your little phrase was God's gift to the software development community. The simple fact is that O'Reilly came up with a phrase for a transition that was already in progress--much like the phrases "Baby Boomers" and "Generation X," and this phrase was popularized not because of some kind of mass marketing campaign on O'Reilly's part, but because of the thousands of authors, bloggers, and writers out there who simply chose the most readily available term to describe something that was happening (and... ahem..., in case you missed it, they didn't mean a conference). Tim O'Reilly's amazing take on this--that somehow he is owed an appology for all the mud flying his way--is a slap in the face to everyone who popularized the term for him (99.99% of which are neither employed by O'Reilly or CMP and probably didn't attend his conference either for that matter).

[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/web_20_service_mark_controvers.html

[2] http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php