To start with the difference between 1.0 and 2.0 some people are curious about, here I quote Joe Drumgoole's a little comparative analysis:
- Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing
- Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
- Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
- Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
- Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
- Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
- Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
- Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
- Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
- Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales
- Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
- Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
- Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
- Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
- Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

Then, what is metadata? Metadata is "data about data" and can be text, voice, or image that describes what the audience wants or needs to see or experience. Metadata is important because it aids in clarifying and finding the actual data. (from wiki)
E.g. Metadata that document data about data elements or attributes, (name, size, data type, etc) and data about records or data structures (length, fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.). Metadata may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data.
The most important issue here is does meta help your ranking in web marketing? Some people give postive answers while some say no. However, Google do recommend using Meta description tage. I did not have any concepts of meta until one of my team members in Marketing recommended making use of it to raise the ranking of IMBA of NTHU. To summarize, from my understanding, Goolge will use Meta information as associated keywords to search for the required relevant resources and it aids the ranking.