I’m updating my RSS feeds and came across an interesting article by Andy Gluck over at Financial Advisor magazine. He talks about Web 2.0 and some of the sites that he and his kids have been using.

He ran into the same problem Mike did when he talked about Web 2.0 a few months ago. If you ask ten different people what “Web 2.0″ means, you’ll get ten different answers.

From the article:

It’s reminiscent of the six blind men who each touch different parts of an elephant. One touches the tusks and says the elephant is like a spear, another touches the trunk and says the elephant is like a snake, and so on. In this case, the beast is so large and multifaceted—the World Wide Web 2.0—that it, too, defies any single definition and is experienced in different ways.

Andy talks about del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that I dislike. I love the concept and have played with it but I thought it was clunky. He mentions that it took him an hour or so before he got comfortable with the interface and started having fun with it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot.

The article doesn’t tie back to the wealth management world but it touched on something close to my heart, the democratization of information via the Internet. One of the interesting features of most Web 2.0 sites is that users vote on various aspects of the site.

A great example of this is Digg. It’s a list of links that have been submitted by users, and voted on by other users. The good articles quickly rise to the top of the list and the bad ones get voted off the site, so 99.9% of users don’t waste their time with them.

If that sounds like an interesting idea, check out reddit. Digg is mainly used by younger users and reddit is the adult version. It tends to have a slightly anti-Bush/GOP theme but – if you haven’t noticed yet – I don’t see that as a negative. Be careful, reddit is extremely addictive.

Another great Web 2.0 example is Prosper.com, which I blogged about last week. Sidebar: I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to set up an account. I’m hoping the nice Prosper.com employee who posted earlier (and obviously tracks all mentions of the site) could intervene for me. I answered one of the verification questions incorrectly and have been waiting a week for a phone call to re-verify my information. Thx.

Back to democratizing the web, this has important real-world ramifications, particularly in the ability of net activists to alter the political discourse. If you’ve been watching the early 2008 presidential debates, you’ll notice that Ron Paul (R) and Mike Gravel (D) have been getting a lot of attention. If you read Digg or reddit, you probably know more about Paul and Gravel than you do about top-tier candidates like Hillary and Giuliani.

Nobody had heard of them before the debates. And nobody would have heard about them afterward except for the fact that several well-know blogs loved their debate performance. This was picked up on by reddit and Digg, where Paul/Gravel submissions quickly soared to the top of the sites. Their newfound popularity was immediately reflected in online polls, resulting in Paul and Gravel “winning” the debates.

At that point, they became a mainstream media phenomena as well… all driven by vote-driven social networking sites. Amazing. This technology is changing the world we live in.