chmod web 777

It turns out that lots of people don’t like (well, okay, despise) the term Web 2.0 because they see it as just a bunch of marketing hooey. If you fall into that camp, an alternative name is becoming increasingly popular as some folks, their inner geeks in full view, are stumping for the phrase chmod 777 web.
Unix mavens will recognize the inference immediately and will be chuckling to themselves. For everyone else, here’s the background: chmod is short for “change mode,” and it’s the Unix command you use to change the permissions on a file or directory. There are three types of permissions—read, write, and execute—and each one is either on (1) or off (0). So if a file has read, write, and execute permissions turned on, you write that as 111, which is the binary equivalent to decimal 7. Lastly, you specify three different sets of permissions for each object: the owner of the file, the members of the file’s group, and everyone else. So if you give read, write, and execute permission to all three sets of users, that’s written as 777, and the command that applies these permissions is chmod 777.
So what does this have to do with Web 2.0? Well, the Web has always been about reading (users have “read” permission), but Web 2.0 is characterized by socially produced knowledge such as that found on wiki-based sites (“write” permission), and by sites that look and feel like desktop programs (“execute” permission). So chmod 777 web has all the essential characteristics of this new phase of Web development built right into the phrase.
That’s not to say that chmod 777 web is destined for lexical stardom. It’s not a phrase that trips lightly off the tongue; explaining what it means takes too long; and it’s Geeky with a capital “G.” Still, I love it, because it exudes an in-your-face cleverness and an admirable compactness (so much meaning in such a short phrase!). It wouldn’t surprise me to see this phrase take up residence in some of the blogosphere’s nerdier neighborhoods, especially those where “Web 2.0” is a verboten term.