A little behind the times as always, but I learned yesterday that CMP and O’Reilly have registered Web 2.0 as a ‘service mark’, effectively attempting to prevent anyone from organising any kind of live event which uses the term ‘Web 2.0′ in the title without their express permission.  They chose to assert their ownership of it by launching a ‘cease and desist’ demand at an Irish Web 2.0 Half Day Conference, the organiser of which had received a ‘best of luck with your event’ message three months earlier from, er… Tim O’Reilly.

Reactions on the company’s own blog were less than positive.

Googling “Web 2.0″ produces 28.7 million hits, yet I’ve never been very convinced by it, tending to side with those that think it’s not much more than a trendy buzzword that doesn’t actually say all that much.  Perhaps this will mean that we have to be a bit more thoughtful about what it is that we’re actually doing and how we should describe it.

Now if only we’d thought to call the new service CETIS 2.0…