Web 2.0 declines, micro-blogging up

Web 2.0, file-sharing, and VoIP all have something in common - they're all technological terms that are being used less than they used to be. Instead, terms such as micro-blogging, crowdsourcing and wiki are taking their place in everyday tech parlance. A report from Pingdom, a website performance monitoring firm, found that many buzzwords of yesteryear are slipping into obscurity. Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 are less commonly used in search queries than in the past, having peaked in 2007, and VoIP has been in decline as a search term since 2005. However, micro-blogging - a term used to describe the activity of making short, regular status updates to a network of contacts - is on the rise as a search term, largely thanks to the popularity of Twitter. Crowdsourcing - a term that describes the solving of a problem by an online community - is also on the rise, as is social networking, unsurprisingly. However, terms that have only come to the fore relatively recently - such as cloud computing and the semantic web - are in decline. www.pingdom.com