There's been a lot of discussion lately about the term "Web 2.0" - about what it means, why people use it, why O'Reilly owns it, why you don't, why people defend trademarks, and, of course why we should all care.

Well - you can all relax now. The folks from Underscore_ Consulting have answered your questions in a great little movie from Barcamp Boston (hat tip to Rob Hyndman for the link).

The video's really funny (particularly if you're a fan of the Colbert Report's News Reporter Visuals with Attitude) and it hits on a lot of truths about this current "bubble", some subtle and some more obvious. I agree with a lot of what's said (see any rounded corners on our site?) but I have to take umbrage with one of their points: tag clouds. I know they're all over this wild new web and, yeah, some people put them in for the sake of having them, but unlike some of the stranger "usability" enhancements we've been seeing lately, I actually do find value in them - enough so that we added our own version in this blog's tag soup. It's a really quick and very visual way to get a feeling for what we're posting about and how often we're doing it which is difficult to do with other UI widgets. There's one other axis of information I'd like to work in there somehow - the recency of the use of the term - and I've been thinking about different ways to handle it. Some thoughts:

• We could go with a heat map a la Ben Hammersley and I really like what he's done there, though I would maybe keep the font sizing effect for post frequency and use the position and colouring in the grid to indicate post recency.
• We could do a separate tag soup, labelled differently, where sizing indicates most frequently discussed topics from the last week. I'm less a fan of this approach because it requires a second widget with the same appearance but different meaning (up with consistency!).
• We could leave our existing tag soup the way it is but use a second dimension of colour to indicate when posts happened. Using a cool to warm gradient of colours, we could show how "hot" tags are in terms of when they were last posted, with a legend below showing the colours on a timeline. I'm leaning towards this idea most strongly, though I'm not a fan of using colour by itself to indicate something in a UI given the prevelance of colour blindness. We're okay here because it's not essential information and the visitors with colour blindness conditions will see the key incorrectly as well so they might still be able to understand the data.

Thoughts? Opinions? Tag cloud smackdowns? Post 'em in the comments.