Council goes Web 2.0?

Whilst looking for something else completely, I found an article about Manchester City Council’s website in Computer Weekly from last year (25/07/07- not available on their website though) that claims the council’s new site launched last year is “Web 2.0″. Hmm. I really liked some aspects of the site- it has the option to show lists of popular topics as a tag cloud for example, which is really user friendly and a typical feature of web 2.0 stuff- but the ‘cloud’ itself is tags assigned by the website itself, not its users. It also has a news RSS feed – though I always think the most useful feeds for the council website would be for jobs (but maybe that’s just my agenda…) The article also seems to suggest that there’s the option for social bookmarking, though I couldn’t see that anywhere on the site.
However- I guess what I’m most interested in is, is it Web 2.0? Possibly not, if you consider the idea of Web 2.0 as being open to user generated content, which I’d argue is the defining factor. There isn’t an option to do that here. But then again, do we really need or want a council site to be fully web 2.0 operational? I’m not sure there’s a need for it in any case. It does have some useful web 2.0 style surface features that make it more user friendly to those used to using social networking sites and blogs, and these are mostly optional (like the tag cloud) meaning that those unfamiliar with this don’t necessarily need to be confronted with it. I’d be interested to see how much web 2.0 design could be used on a site like this, and it be effective. I’d imagine it could potentially incorporate more of a local community forum, though there are issues from a corporate identity or responsiblity point of view.