Web Two Point Wha?

I think Wired’s epi­cen­ter blog needs to clar­i­fy one of today’s posts a bit:

Big Pay­day for Web 2.0The biggest web deal announced today was CBS’ plan to buy CNET, one of the last inde­pen­dent online con­tent com­pa­nies, for $1.8 bil­lion, or $11.50 per share. The val­u­a­tion rep­re­sents a healthy 45 per­cent pre­mi­um over yes­ter­day’s clos­ing price, and it’s a cou­ple hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars more than the $1.6 bil­lion CNET spent on its ZDNet acqui­si­tion eight years ago.

Let’s be clear: CNET (for­mer­ly C|Net, as I recall) is con­sid­ered Web 2.0? As in the same CNET Cen­tral I used to watch Richard Hart, Gina St. John, Ryan Seacrest, and John C. Dvo­rak on back in 1997? I just don’t see CNET as being any­thing oth­er than Web 1.0. Peri­od. They are still a pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ist-dri­ven site, even they allow a few user com­ments here-and-there. There’s no social aspect to the site to speak of. Just because it was a big acqui­si­tion of a most­ly internet/tech com­pa­ny does­n’t make it fall into the lat­est buzz­word space. You’d think Bet­sy Schiff­man, and Wired, would know bet­ter than to just throw around hip labels with­out think­ing. To be fair, the arti­cle also men­tions Com­cast’s acqui­si­tion of Plaxo (which has me a bit con­cerned about the pri­va­cy of my friends and fam­i­ly) but clear­ly is focus­ing on the big-dol­lar deal of the day, here. It appears a bet­ter title would have been “Web 1.0 final­ly pay­ing off.”