If you're like me, you've probably been doing your best to ignore all the noise surrounding a vaguely defined next-generation Internet "movement" that, from a distance, doesn't seem to have a lot of relevance to life in general, much less to the world of electronics and the design challenges you face every day.

Consider this your Web 2.0 wake-up call.

The alarm clock rang for me last week in two very different and far-removed settings--New York and Grenoble. The first insight came during an "Innovation and Growth in a Flat World" event in Times Square, organized by software maker CollabNet and Information Week, a sister publication of EE Times. In a "what's next" executive-summit panel discussion, Thomas Friedman (author of The World is Flat) and Internet luminary Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media sparred with two other vendor/user panelists.

When the smoke cleared and all of the Web 2.0 hype and technobabble were stripped away, what I learned was this: The Internet is about to become an adult, and when it does, it will transform itself from its commercial library-cum-shopping mall paradigm into a genuine tool for human collaboration. It will do this, Friedman observed, by enabling communities of open-source programmers to tap the "network effect" in search of excellence and to create systems that "get better the more people use them."

Flat, egalitarian, open and collaborative, Web 2.0 looks like a hippie's dream, and O'Reilly--one of the Net's most illustrious iconoclasts--said as much. "This is what we all hoped would happen," the now ponytail-less O'Reilly proclaimed of Web 2.0, dubbing it something akin to free love for the 21st century.

It all made sense to a boomer like me. Hey, I have my own memories of the Summer of Love.

But what I couldn't quite figure out was: What does it mean for electronics design? It had to mean something. Engineers, after all, are the ones who invented the Internet and e-mail and TCP/IP and all the rest. And what goes around comes around.

Still, I just couldn't connect the dots.

Then, out of the blue, while chairing last week's keynote-speaker session at Gabrielle Saucier's IP/SoC Conference (the global design reuse and intellectual-property event, now in its 10th year in Grenoble, France), I suddenly got it.

The flash of insight was generated by a slide thrown up on the screen by Fadi Azhari, director of marketing and business development for Sun Microsystems' OpenSparc initiative and a savvy observer when it comes to Web 2.0. As if channeling Friedman and O'Reilly, Azhari laid it all out.

For design engineers, Web 2.0 is something that "matters more than ever," the enabling technology of the next "participative [design] infrastructure," Azhari said. It has the potential to fuel "microprocessor innovation with massive C multithreading," to unleash the "power of communities" in the next wave of innovation through "high-bandwidth, efficient design work" and to create "a new ecosystem" to "take advantage of new, highly threaded architectures" that will spill over to affect CAD tools, integration and test suites, compilers, debuggers, and other tools.

Web 2.0 will enable "integratable architecture," or standards-based interfaces for building-block integration, Azhari said. It will foster the "ability to innovate freely within and outside the CPU core"--a key to growing new market applications--while giving engineers the "ability to cooperate freely as a community," eliminating barriers to the sharing of intellectual property as a key to accelerating innovation.

Are we awake yet?