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Web 2.0: It's a term that's been floating around with ever-increasing frequency since Tim O'Reilly and company brought it into the spotlight in 2004. It's the move from the web as a one-way street to a two way street. Oreillynet.com gives the examples of moving from Britannica Online to Wikipedia. From Ofoto to Flickr. From taxonomy to folksonomy. From publishing to participation.

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Welcome to OSS NewsWatch for August! What news do we have to impart to you this month? Plenty, as always. There are several tidbits that pertain directly to SPs and a few others that are just plain interesting, but don't take my word for it. Instead, read on to discover the news that we at Pipeline thought was as hot as the month of August. Enjoy!

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This month, we took a little time to speak to Joe Savage, the President of the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council, the leading industry forum dedicated to advancing FTTH in the US and beyond. We spoke to Joe in last September's issue of Pipeline, (http://www.pipelinepub.com/0907/EC2_1.html) and thought we'd check in to see what's changed and what remains the same.

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We are an industry of buzz words. To convey something new or dramatically changed, we do sometimes need a freshly created word, acronym, or repurposed word. This is because when we come up with something really new the old words don't get the message across. On the other hand, sometimes there isn't really much new at all – the new buzz words are just marketing spin. "Cloud Computing" is a term that is spreading fast with many different things all being called Cloud Computing.

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If you're driving in Chicago and come to a red light, make sure to stop. While this is a good idea in any major city, it is especially so in Chicago. One-hundred and one intersections are now equipped with camera-based systems that automatically record infractions and issue citations to motorists who ignore red lights. These robo-cops have generated more than $72 million in revenue for the city and have succeeded in reducing red light running incidents and collisions...

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The allure of new revenues from a managed digital television service offering hit its stride in 2004 when the world's leading service providers began making decisions about the requisite service delivery architecture for IPTV. The technical challenges of IPTV were significant: the service requires a cost-effective architecture that delivers high subscriber scale, high bandwidth throughput per-subscriber and high concurrency. Furthermore, IPTV is a "managed" service due to the strict quality of service requirements needed to deliver a high quality and "always on" experience to the mass market...

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Web 2.0 has provided the end user free reign to the content and communities they seek on the Internet, resulting in the rapid development of social networking sites, wikis, and blogs. The changes have been so swift that often unwary service providers have been relegated to mere onlookers. However, to continue to ignore this business revolution is foolhardy -- a provider who wishes to stake claim to the end user must embrace the demands of the Web 2.0 phenomenon now!

Web 2.0 refers to a large set of ideas and techniques behind many new Web sites and services that encourage user interaction, communication, and collaboration. Communication service providers (CSPs) can take advantage of this new breed of web- based communities and hosted services known as Web 2.0 to enable more flexible service delivery mechanisms and greater revenue opportunities.

“If you've always done it that way, it's probably wrong."

It's telling that Kettering, who uttered those words decades and decades ago, is the man who brought us the electric automobile starter, as well as leaded gasoline and Freon. As time has passed, we've learned that change is constant and necessary. While some basic concepts are worth retaining, others need to be updated or cast aside altogether.