As much as any journalist would like to claim they are above such things, much of the media loves it when products, strategies and announcements are heavily hyped. Whether coverage showers things with equally hyperbolic praise, or shoots ’em down dead in their tracks and picks apart the inadequacies like vultures, hype helps make good stories. And the hype doesn’t come much heavier than for Web 2.0.

It’s everywhere; even PC giant Dell is riding on its coattails by christening its new customer-responsive strategy Dell 2.0. Although for such a well-known tag, it’s surprisingly difficult to find any broad consensus over what it actually means.

We have publisher Tim O’Reilly to thank for the term, and it does what all good publicity sets out to do: it gets people talking. Whether you believe that the myriad and quite diverse technologies and ideas it describes should be appropriated under a sweeping general term or not, you’d be hard pushed to find anyone in the industry today who has no opinion.

Web 2.0 can probably be reduced to a couple of key concepts: improved user experience and collaboration, and the democratisation of information. Back in the 1990s when the web first burst on the scene, it was like a teenage girl band; it looked pretty and sounded OK but lacked real substance. Problem was, people started to believe the hype, and only discovered the web’s shortcomings after they’d lavished billions of dollars on it. It still had potential but couldn’t deliver in the short term, and the party ended.

Consumers have now got used to the internet, though, and want to exert more influence over it. Near ubiquitous broadband has made us more impatient, and has raised our expectations. We demand a good experience when surfing and interacting with sites. We’re not fussy where we buy our gear from online, as long as the price is right and the experience is hassle-free, and that is both terrifying and exciting for firms – a challenge and an opportunity.

So there are a lot of people talking about Web 2.0. Analyst firm Gartner’s now-famous hype cycle model charts the natural progression of emerging technology through peaks of heightened user-expectations and troughs of disillusionment towards maturity and widescale adoption. This year it pointed to certain Web 2.0 technologies, such as Ajax and mashups, as “high to moderate impact” and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. Jackie Fenn, who developed the hype cycle model, told me that even if these technologies are only deployed in a limited way by enterprises, they will have a positive impact on business.

So whether you believe all the hype or not, Web 2.0 is changing the way users behave, retailers react and enterprises interact with their staff and business partners. Those who fail to embrace it will probably be left behind.