advergirl has an interesting post (via AdRants) asking her readers for help in identifying what makes a Web 2.0 site. I personally like the way she’s broken down her examples into “Web 1.0″, “Web 2.0 in the raw” and “Web 2.0 by a brand.”

A newsletter sign-up form from our client, AARP, shows up as the Web 1.0 example for “Principle #6: From Accessible to Personal.” This intrigued me, so I delved into what I think makes the other examples personal:

Web 2.0 in the raw: NewsGator.com

NewsGator offers several different RSS aggregators for individuals and businesses, as well as syndication services for content providers. While I use Google Reader myself, I totally understand why advergirl chose NG to represent personalization. Instead of signing up for a single newsletter where the provider determines what I want to read a la AARP.com, I can subscribe to a myriad of RSS feeds and personalize the content to suit my tastes. (For the record, AARP.com offers RSS feeds in addition to email newsletters.)

Web 2.0 by a brand: Target.com

Target has a feature on its site called TargetLists that “lets you keep track of everything you want to give or get. You can create, find, organize and share lists for any person, any event or any occasion.” Sounds pretty similar to Amazon’s wish list service, but I like Target’s ability to bridge the gap between brick & mortar and online by allowing you to add items to your list while you’re in one of the stores.

Web 2.0 by a brand: Firefox.com

I conducted a little experiment a few months ago where I made Firefox the default browser on my Windows desktop at work. (At home, I only have Macs, save for the Windows notebook I need for work-related tasks, and Safari is normally my browser of choice.) And the result? Firefox is still my default browser on that machine — just not the out-of-the-box install of Firefox — thanks to being able to personalize the heck out of the browser.

One of the personalization features of the Firefox site is the Firefox Add-ons section. I can’t function in my day job without Internet Explorer, so my solution was to install IETab, which allows you to run IE’s rendering engine inside of Firefox. Quite cool, especially the ability to set up sites to automatically open in the IE engine.

Here’s a brief list of some of my other favorite Firefox Add-ons:

• FireBug — edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
• Colorful Tabs — colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish
• FireFTP — a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client
• DownloadThemAll — a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser

Some of her other principles are equally as interesting, such as “1. From Finding Information to Making Connections” and “7. From Expert Voice to Peer Credibility,” but maybe I’ll save those comparisons for a later post.