The Death of Web 2.0 is somewhat exaggerated

Robin Wauters on TechCrunch notes that the "Web 2.0" hype is reducing (see graph above) and deduces this is equivalent to its death:

Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.

However, those familiar with the Gartner Hype Curve will realise that this shows more that it has gone "off-hype" into the trough of despond, from which the useful stuff emerges after a darwinian culling of the chaff.

Another reason it will not die per se is that it was a useful "catch-all" phrase for a whole variety of technologies that emerged in 2002-4 across the online value chain - I recall trying to describe much of this new architecture in 2003 - 4 as a "broadband value chain" and even "digital logistics" - so Web 2.0 when it was coined was a very useful - and better sounding - term.