You can save yourself some time in the future by just coming to us first – we’ll give you ten different answers without sending you all over the web. Not because we don’t know what “web 2.0” is, but because it means different things to different people. Kind of like success, or those truck stop signs that read “Eat Here / Get Gas.”

Industry pundits sometimes use “web 2.0” to discuss the comeback of Internet-based businesses. Although hundreds of internet companies with promising concepts floundered during the dot-com bust of the late 1990s, the web remains a lucrative business venue. Try telling the founders of YouTube that nobody makes money on the web any more.

Other conjurers of the “web 2.0” specter are referring to the latest trends in graphic design. Concrete “web 2.0” design elements include larger fonts (furl.net), bold colors (blogger.com) or pastels (twitter.com), reflections (apple.com), colorful icons (linkedin.com), rounded edges and gradients (digg.com).

We programmers tend to defer to uber-PropellerHead and big-idea-guy Tim O’Reilly, who helped coin the term and expounded on the idea at tinyurl.com/743r5.

One characteristic of a “web 2.0” site is that it encourages user participation. Extreme examples are myspace.com and facebook.com, but another popular one is amazon.com. Helpful hints like “Customers who bought Guide to French Military Victories also bought Everything Men Know About Women” encourage sales by using data the site collects anyway.

Another 2.0-ism is looking beyond just the desktop. People browse the web on mobile phones, Blackberries, and TV sets now, so prepare accordingly by providing specialized web pages or sites that degrade gracefully on smaller screens. Photo-sharing site and “web 2.0” darling flickr.com allows users to upload photos from their phones, and Google offers a stripped-down interface at m.google.com.

Google Maps also ushered in the era of web mash-ups – sites that use data from multiple providers to create new services. See googlemapsmania.blogspot.com for a directory of sites that integrate Google Maps with other data sources to provide travel tips and pointers to cheap gas. Yahoo! (maps.yahoo.com) and Microsoft (maps.live.com) provide similar capabilities

Social networking behemoths MySpace and FaceBook also provide hooks into their platform for third-party sites like yours.

So what were your marketing consultants talking about? You could play it safe and switch to pastel colors, redesign for mobile phones, add maps, and integrate with FaceBook. Or you could just ask them. In the meantime, just remember: get your gas at the truck stop, your hot air from marketing consultants, and your technology answers from us. Just think of us as Tech Support, 2.0.