April 17, 2007
The Web By Numbers
The exclusive Web 2.0 conference, where the term first gained currency in October 2004, has spawned a larger Web 2.0 Expo making its debut this week in San Francisco.
The standard conference format and IBM, Nokia, Microsoft and Intel booths at the Moscone West exhibition centre seem a world away from the image of Web 2.0 one-man businesses being run out of San Francisco coffee shops.
But there are still traces of that maverick spirit in the formalised proceedings, with sessions such as Ten Ways To Run A Startup Like Genghis Khan and What I Learned From Syphilis: Epidemiology and Viral Marketing.
An “Ignite” session, where presenters had to talk for five minutes over 20 slides changing every 15 seconds, produced a number of interesting concepts:
- Instructables – a site promoting open-source hardware gave a demonstration on making crossbows out of K’nex bricks.
- Justin.TV – the guy with a camera fixed permanently to his head spoke about how to get a lot of free press.
- Octopart – a search engine for electronic parts from a company founded at the South Pole.
- WebFS – a new file-exchange protocol that would allow users to store all their web-based content in one place.
None of the above seems particularly Web 2.0 in terms of the original sense of social software and the innovative use of browser scripts. This suggests the name has become a catch-all term for any Web-related innovation. And yet the packed keynote sessions show Web 2.0 still has a certain cachet.
