Despite the ubiquity of the World Wide Web, many of its users are still a little bit fuzzy about the exact meaning of some of its latest developments. Like, what for an example, is an RSS feed and why should you need it? Similarly, despite the Interweb being full to the brim with spurious and specious blogs, how many people out of a world population of 6 billion know how to blog, let alone why?

Yet we’re constantly being assured that these online tools, marketed under the catchall term of Web 2.0, are the future of communications, commerce and connectivity. Without getting too technical, the journey from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 can be loosely described as a transition from read only content to a read-write framework. This includes sites like YouTube where users are able to upload their own videos through a simple online interface and share them with the world.

So huge was the explosion of popularity around sites like YouTube, MySpace, eBay and Blogger.com that Time Magazine was prompted to make all of us, as the new content creators, its Person of the Year in 2006.  Yet, two years later, even those sites now look outdated as more of us enjoy high-speed broadband services at home that include video-on-demand, network gaming and three dimensional ‘virtual’ worlds like Second Life.

But as much as the technology has supposedly freed us, it’s the changes in our behaviour it has provoked that are more far reaching. In the US this year dozens of newspapers have downsized, shedding staff and shifting their emphasis towards their online operations. Hardest hit have been the small-town papers with low circulations that are unable to compete with the immediacy of information, especially audio and video reporting, on the Web.

Industry rumours suggest that many major international newspapers are planning to shelve their print editions within the next five years to rebrand themselves as online media organizations offering interactive content, and indeed many TV companies, most notably the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation now make much of its current and archived content available for free streaming from its website (through a special media player).

And the film companies are also, slowly, coming round to the idea. Earlier this year Joss Whedon, the writer-producer behind TV hits including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, premiered his latest creation Dr Horrible online. With an all-star cast, the low-budget 15-minute episodes were specifically designed to be viewed online and on mobile players, allowing fans to purchase and download the series through retailers like the Net-based iTunes Store.

While Whedon put his energies into Dr Horrible largely as a response to the Writers Guild strike that paralysed much of US TV during the first half of this year, its foundations are built on cult shows like lonelygirl15 which first appeared as a seeming videoblog until it was later revealed to be the work of a group of underground New York film-makers.

That show has already spawned a more commercial spin-off in the form of KateModern which was aired on social networking site Bebo, as well as the animated Afterworld the 90-second episodes of which were specifically designed to be downloaded and viewed on the current generation of media-rich cell-phones and mobile devices.

And for those terminally addicted to blogging they can now ‘twitter’ from their mobiles, posting their tweets online and receiving tweets from feeds they subscribe to. If the last sentence had you reaching for the geek dictionary, don’t worry: it’s literally so complicated to explain that you may be better off not knowing.

But it’s from within these social networks that the biggest changes are being forged. Look at Facebook. What started as a network for students at US college Harvard now has more than 120 million users worldwide, a figure that represents around 1% of the world’s total population. Imagine a TV channel that could boast so many viewers and imagine the potential advertising revenues it could generate.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with firing a few ads at users once in a while: they provide a zero cost service, so effectively that ad exposure is the ‘fee’ its consumer base pays. But more importantly the social networks and other online developments mark a shift away from the open-access philosophy that founded the World Wide Web to closed, commercial systems that potentially own the information, photos and videos that users post on them.

But closed or not, sites like Facebook have really delivered the online democracy that Web 2.0 pointed to. More than that, it has become a grassroots platform that enables anything from organizing a back garden barbecue to more politically and socially motivated activities. It has even become a way for neighbourhood businesses to talk directly and cheaply to its customer base.

And, privacy issues and technology gap aside, that’s perhaps the biggest transformation: where once we had to be tempted to visit the online presence of stores and retailers, now they can come to us, pre-armed with the kind of information they know we’ll appreciate.  And as for those RSS feeds, well you’ll just have to Wiki it, won’t you?