As he consumed Eric Schmidt's press briefing during the Google CEO's mid-week stopover in Seoul, web strategist Jeremy Owyang posted a note on Twitter saying that he was "Laughing at Eric Schmidt's definition of Web 2.0..." – "He says that web 2.0 is AJAX. ROFL" Owyang wrote.

Google CEO Dr Eric Schmidt was in Korea to attend the Seoul Digital Forum

In Korea to attend the Seoul Digital Forum, Schmidt puzzled the blogosphere by describing Web 2.0 as "a different way of building applications using AJAX as the underlying technology." As if alternative approaches to building Rich Internet Applications, such as those made possible using OpenLaszlo or Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe AIR maybe didn't exist.

He was quick to move on to how the new generation of tools being introduced by Google (and others) would very soon be ushering in a very different application model, "Web 3.0" – which in turn he defined as applications that are pieced together which are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, apps can run on any device (PC or mobile), apps are very fast, very customizable, and distributed virally by social networks and/or e-mail, not bought in stores.

Canadian blogger Chris Dumke noted, after viewing the whole thing, appropriately enough, on a YouTube video:

"At first Schmidt refuses to indulge in “hype-terms”, such as Web 2.0 and others. But he can’t resist speaking about connected, atomic, high-performance Internet apps and risks calling this Web 3.0."

"In fact, it is in many ways in opposition to Web 2.0, Boutelle wrote in July of that year. "AJAX applications create web-pages that are less machine-readable/linkable," he continued, whereas "Web 2.0 is about making websites machine readable so that content can squirt seamlessly between unrelated sites."

Boutelle took a particularly extreme position, mind you:

"Technologies like RSS, RESTian APIs, and XHTML/CSS are the core of Web 2.0. Social networks and tagging and attention are at the core of Web 2.0. Not rich client technologies like AJAX."

"Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people. Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers."

Google speakers have frequently spoken at AJAXWorld in the past, from Adam Bosworth and Paul Rademacher to Adam Sah and Chris Schalk.

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