It is the start of the second day of the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco, and I am looking forward to hearing more from many of today’s Internet leaders, entrepreneurs, and assorted creatures of the Web.  There are more than 11,000 people here from all over the world, and they are hungry to learn, share, create, and generate new business.

There has been a lot of industry debate and accusations of over-hyping surrounding the term, “Web 2.0,” which seems to obfuscate the issue even more, but suffice to say that it serves to describe the continuing evolution of web applications for the purpose of greater online collaboration and sharing. Call it what you will, all I care about is the fact that there is some very cool stuff out there that is making our lives easier and richer.

Yesterday, I attended a session on “Building Web 2.0: Next-generation Web Platforms,” and one of the hot topics was the need for increased understanding between networks and the applications that run through them. How much does the network need to know? Well, that prompted a question from the audience regarding net neutrality and the conversation went elsewhere.

The other topic the panel really focused on was the future of networks and whether businesses in the future really need to build their own. There are huge infrastructure costs that new and existing businesses must support, and in many cases it is only required for occasional spikes. This led perfectly into the keynote speech by Jeff Bezos from Amazon. Instead of focusing on the Long Tail of products or his side space project, he discussed Amazon’s web services, which he described as a service that eliminates many of the “fixed costs and fixed burdens” for entrepreneurs. His analogy was something to the effect of why build the bar when you just want one drink.

I attended another session on User Generated Content and Privacy with Lauren Gelman, who is the associate director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS), and then a session on tagging with Thomas Vander Wal, which must have had more than 500 people in attendance. It was basically an overview, but I was hoping to gather any useful information that would help us with clients for whom we have build tag-based systems.

The Expo Hall Booth Crawl was absolutely packed, but it was tolerable because there was a lot of great new technology to learn about and every so often you could fill up on wine or beer at one of the booths. I also of course had to grab myself a web 2.0 t-shirt, which naturally says, “Web 2.0 is”….followed by a blank space you can fill in with an indelible marker. There were so many different businesses there. Some were very focused on improving business operations with new easier-to-use applications like Apollo, and others were focused on users and building a substantial subscriber base…

So, more to come, but in the interim I am headed off to hear what Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has to say in, “Conversations with John Battelle.”

This entry was posted by Robert Payne on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:51 am and is filed under Current Affairs, Social Networking. 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.