Doc Searls, one of the authors behind The Cluetrain Manifesto, a primer on how the Internet is transforming business as usual, weighs in to the recent discussion on 'What's wrong with social media' (Funny that, as the terms social media and Web 2.0 become more and more mainstream, the efforts to define, describe an explain the phenomena grows ever more inventive). Highlights from Doc Searl's post on the issue below, full text here:

On Social media
I don't think of my what I do here as production of "information" that others "consume". Nor do I think of it as "one-to-many" or "many-to-many". I think of it as writing that will hopefully inform readers. Informing is not the same as delivering information. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you. What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us. The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.)

On Web 2.0
I don't use the term "Web 2.0" either. When asked a long time ago to define what it meant to me, I said it's the name we'll give to the next crash.