I think I may have had a Web 2.0 epiphany. If you haven’t come across the label yet, Web 2.0 is one of those terms without a meaning that has been floating around the heads of a lot of clever and creative people without any one really explaining it. The best explanation I’d seen until about half an hour ago was the Web 2.0 checklist, which does cover almost everything you need.

However, I’m think Web 2.0 is the signifier for the increasing tendency towards bottom-up or emergent methods of organising and retrieving information. Emergent behavior is the principle of intelligent behaviour arising from many simple parts. How this relates to the web is easy to see. On Flickr (or Moblog), I tag my photos, you tag your photos. Nothing special there, but add a page which shows all photos for a certain tag and suddenly you have a new resource: a new collection emerges “by itself”, correctly selecting the relevant shards of our independent collections. We don’t plan any one collection, but they happen as a function of the volume of uploading and tagging.

So tags, though disarmingly simple, can cut wide seams into a body of knowledge, powering later information retrieval. The work of bringing the knowledge together is relatively straightforward. Sufficiently straightforward that Technorati can do it for 21.9m blogs across the web.

Services like Technorati that cut horizontal lines through many vertical information sources highlight another aspect of Web 2.0: XML access to databases. RSS, Atom, OPML, RDF, REST are all acronyms that signify relatively bare bones availability of data. These data are open for easy recombination: web mash-ups. I take your data and combine it with someone else’s and create something new. The best mash-ups are impressive demos of the Web 2.0 concept. Take chicagocrime.org, created by Django’s lead developer, Adrian Holovaty. Chicagocrime pulls a feed of crime information direct from the Chicago Police Department and presents that information on a map powered by Google’s maps API. The result is a really great way to work out which neighbourhoods of Chicago you shouldn’t move to.

I would like to be able to take my business ideas and make them part of Web 2.0. Cohack provides reporting, it can benefit hugely from Web 2.0, because more and more information is there to be sucked into our engine. Want a daily report mapping the average temperature in 25 cities compared against the smog index? That would take me no time to build. Before mash-ups started happening, the first RSS applications were news readers, kind of auto-browsers. Then podcasts became popular because RSS+MP3/MPEG decouples download from use and allow content to be delivered and consumed in a really convenient way. But things really get interesting when you start to recombine and manipulate the data as part of the daily feedsuck. Our AdKnowledge application (and many others) could give you a dashboard built from unifying a thousand separate sources automatically. AdKnowledge gives it you in Excel, not very Web 2.0, but perfect for business people to work with right now. Excel is to humans as XML is to computers, a good starting point for processing operations, so even the delivery isn’t the end of the process of manipulation.

When any data can be acquired for processing just by knowing the right url, original sources of data become more valuable. Moblog is the conduit for mobile content. Yours, mine, anyone’s can be addressed easily, if you have the right permissions. There are many interesting applications for this data. Some of the images we get from Japanese phones are already tagged with lat/long data. If that were more prevalent, the next big mash up could be moblogged images of a major terrorist attack placed on a Google map of the city in real-time. Like Greg Robinson’s excellent Mapr application, but with a cloud of camera phone owners creating a sort of emergent super-photographer and with no admin intervention required to get the data straight on to the web. If one shot doesn’t show you what you want to see, the application has one from round the next corner, one from the third floor of the next building, and so on.

I’m writing the business plan for Moblog at the moment and I have to say it’s one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had. On the one hand I’m stuck in this room desperate to kickstart something which I think could be really big. On the other, the first step is a process which I can’t really do. I can get excited and paint a picture of an amazing future of dynamically recombined data from many sources in a blog post, but when it comes to showing an investor how that’s going to return 10x his or her investment in year 5 and conveying the excitement of the opportunity at the same time, I just don’t have it. I can draw the outline and I’m savvy enough now to know that ideas and products are very different things, but the level of detail required is something I’m finding very taxing. I need to make some better contacts I think.