Big, clean, white, missng vowls, that automated "reflection" effect... in fact, throw a reflection and highlight on everything you can, and a gradient on everything else. I've heard it described and explained before in a way that seems to make sense: It's a distilled, simple style that more technologically-focused people can apply (and get on with the technology-ing) and get a good-looking visual style. There's more text style than graphics, a lot of simple or automated procedures, and what style choices there are to make are pretty basic and can easily be applied across the board. It's a style for those who don't want to dedicate a lot of time to styling.

Personally, I think "The Web 2.0 Style" is probably the most fluffy and useless of the things that have been lumped into the overstuffed "Web 2.0" buzzword-bin. More important parts of the "Web 2.0 Revolution" are things like the spread of simplified publishing systems (blogs), which empowered a greater mass of people to interact and made publishing accessible-- and simple-- to everyone (social networking). On the back-end, things like Google Suggest and Maps kicked off the popular interest in "asynchronous" Web data transfer (AJAX, JSON, etc.), while improvements in CSS, JavaScript, and even HTML broadened the toolkit for developers, which drove the push toward smoothly-running Web-based applications.

I think, though, that after the buzzword of "Web 2.0" came into common use, the number of things that "defined" the term just got out of hand, so at this point, "Web 2.0" could pretty well mean anything on the Web and falling into common use after, say, 2000. So, yeah, there's kind of a thing called "Web 2.0 Visual Style", but (in this writer's humble opinion), it's not really something to tout, because the best style-- be it visual or design-- is not what's popular or new, but what is appropriate. That, and the whole "Web 2.0" fluffyfest is just kind of dragging old.

This thread is sooooo 2007. Lol.