EightBlack.

Simple really. To put our finger on the pulse. One of the hardest things to do in this age of “the bigger web” is to actually keep up with it.

Sure, those of us who regard ourselves as being “tech savvy” will be able to talk with some degree of alacrity about the benefits of Twitter and blogging and the importance of being on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

But secretly, many of us hope and prey that this fad will soon pass and our kids will assume control of the environment that we are battling to keep up with. Or at least I am.

I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural Web 2.0 event last year. This year promises to be bigger and better still.

Keynotes from industry titans such as Max Levchin (founder, Slide) - anyone with a Facebook account will know of Slides work, internet pioneer Marc Andreessen (founder of Ning, but better known for his wider contribution to the web with the creation of Netscape), Mitchell Baker (Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, the real browser) -sorry to all you Mac Zealots, Jonathan Schwartz (CEO - Sun Microsystems and corporate blogger extraordinaire), Matt Cutts from Google, Ari Balogh (CTO of Yahoo!) and other industry heavyweights.

For those of you who have never been to Moscone West, the convention centre in San Francisco and the home of Web 2.0 for the rest of this week, here are some highlights.

1. The Moscone Centre (North, South and West) contains 2 million square feet of building area, with over 700,000 square feet of exhibit area. For those Aussies and in particular, folks from Melbourne, the Melbourne Entertainment Centre (Jeffs Shed) is less than half this size.

2. There are 106 meeting rooms

3. Over the course of the event, it is expected that twice the amount of media will attend this year as last and anyones guess of 10,000 plus people will pass through the event.

O’Reilly and TechWeb - the events co-producers have gone to great lengths to promote collaboration at the 2008 event. From The South Park Crawl, to the Booth Crawl at the actual Expo itself, to the Web2Open event (where anyone with a Web 2.0 Expo badge can share knowledge and join in open discussions etc), to the Birds Of A Feather Session (BoF) and the famed Launch Pad Sessions.

There’s no reason for any attendee to be shy - no matter how many un-resolved issues they have.

Web 2.0 provides the opportunity to plug-in to the Web. To gauge it’s pulse. And to connect with the very people who in the driving seat. Sure, 90% of the companies who are busily flogging their wares at the Expo itself and whose PR agencies are furiously pounding away at the media may not survive the next 12-months, the best thing is that there is still a level of belief and confidence in the web itself.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are all watching in the wings. There’s news this week from both Jerry Yang’s crew (earnings announcement Tues US time) and something’s brewing with Microsoft.

I often wondered why Google doesn’t just take the event sponsorship outright. After all, with their recent earnings announcement, they could afford any fee. Instead, Microsoft, IBM and Etelos are the ones who take centre stage in this area.

It promises to be an action packed week. And to me, this event is the highlight of the year (apart from the Web 2.0 Summit).

Stay tuned. Video posts will commence tomorrow. We’ve got some interesting folks lined up who have graciously accepted the invite to talk on camera.

See you in 24 hours…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 6:31 pm and is filed under News, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.