Is Web 2.0 relevant to a systems architect?

On my old sun/oracle blog, I wrote a piece reporting some thoughts about whether Web 2.0 was more than a marketing slogan, and Sun’s decision to market its first storage appliance as web 2.0 server. On re-reading the original article, what comes through is my confusion about the then web 2.0 syndrome and the need and role of systems like the x4500 aka Thumper. This version of the article has been edited; some words about my experimenting with Yahoo’s 1st generation PaaS has been removed. I obviously thought this was part of the future but the reality was that (for that type of application) it fell through the gap between IaaS on which I host this blog, and SaaS, (flickr, google maps and wordpress.com), the first two of which I integrate into the blog, and the latter is a competitor technology. …