Web 2.0 Expo: Time to hit refresh?

Where are the crowds? The Moscone Center was noticeably quieter this year at the Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Evan Bartlett)

SAN FRANCISCO--Stepping off an otherwise quiet street and through the door of the downtown restaurant Roe on Thursday night was, at first, like a foray into a secret fantasy world where no market crash or economic recession had ever happened.

It was the launch party for Yola.com, a rebranded Web publishing platform formerly known as SynthaSite, in conjunction with this week's Web 2.0 Expo down the street at the Moscone convention center. There was an open bar, of course: The signature cocktail was a kir royale, a blend of champagne and blackcurrant liqueur, so champagne flutes were the drinkware of choice in the darkened room. The music was loud. Yola's logo was everywhere--projected on the wall, on T-shirts handed out at the door, on stickers scattered across the bar for the taking.

Yet if you surveyed the scene, there were signs of conscious frugality. The guest list was tight and the party was kept small, with only the ground floor of the two-story Roe booked; the open bar eventually ended, and the kir royales stopped flowing. While Yola was a "silver" sponsor of the conference, the event had not been heavily publicized. The same applied to many of the other scattered parties at the convention. If you knew the details, you could slip into a fun and relatively low-key affair that might even have free drinks and snacks. It was all about doing a bit of digging.

With a "doing more with less" theme, change was in the air at the whole Web 2.0 Expo: This edition of the biannual confab, co-presented by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb, felt like the recession had scooped a hole out of it with a spork. Attendance rates were slightly down, and even though conference representatives said more than 8,000 people came, the halls of The Moscone Center were noticeably quieter than in years past. Yet this is still a must-attend for the majority of the industry. Exhibitors from big tech companies like Microsoft and Adobe, courting developer talent to populate their various platforms and services, said that this is the best way to reach the biggest audience.

And here's what that audience was hearing: that with the harrowing financial climate, there is opportunity in casting off centuries' worth of old institutions that now only serve to hamper innovation.

"The current global financial crisis is the Web's fault," author Douglas Rushkoff said in his Wednesday keynote. "It's a good thing, and...it's really the arresting of a 400- to 500-year process from which value has been extracted from people and companies unfairly and unproductively."

"Six hundred thousand jobs were lost last month, and we've got to believe that the Internet has something to do with the massive restructuring, reorganization, and revitalization of what is our future," Meetup founder Scott Heiferman said in a talk on Friday morning. "They say that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, so there is this opportunity for us to turn our backs to the screen, to turn our backs to a centralized 20th-century culture where we are dependent on these bloated banks and insurance companies."

That's so last century
The irony lies in the fact that with so many talks at the expo fixed on the opportunities presented by financial difficulties, and the final death knells of the 20th-century way of doing things, the convention itself was still an old-school trade show. The expo floor was full (though not as full as last year) of colorful booths and talkative PR representatives, the panel lineup still packed with the usual marketing and programming buzzwords--ROI, SEO, PHP, RSS--and the art of the business card swap still paramount.

"There's just not a whole lot that's cool this year," one disappointed attendee told me. Another said he'd found that after last month's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, there was something stale about the Web 2.0 Expo, even though it was much healthier than many had anticipated. Maybe it's time for a reboot.

You see, if you got past the surface, did a little digging--just like with the after-hours scene--there were some noteworthy talks at Web 2.0 Expo. There was a seminar about just how much you need to know about wine in order to impress business associates, a crash course from Digg's director of business development for old-media types who want to capitalize on the social news craze, and a session about marketing insights from the creator of the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" Facebook app. Keynote speakers like John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and the founders of indie T-shirt sensation Threadless, weren't exactly the sorts of conference highlights you'd expect.

In those talks, the lack of banter about monetization and user engagement was refreshing. The T-shirt clad Threadless guys, for example, didn't really seem to be in their element sitting on couches onstage for a keynote "conversation" in front of an auditorium of laptop-wielding conference-goers in uncomfortable chairs. They were 21st century dot-com heroes in a setting that some of the expo's out-with-the-old speakers would likely have characterized as so last century.

One of the biggest and most promising highlights of the conference was the after-hours Ignite offshoot, the latest in a series of wacky geek-culture seminars presented by O'Reilly and spearheaded by Web 2.0 organizer Brady Forrest. Seven hundred people packed into a nearby nightclub for a set of decidedly unorthodox presentations: a mandated number of PowerPoint slides, set on an automatic timer, so that no one could veer off topic or go over time. Ignite events are held all over the world and have quite a cult following; with presentations like "Mr. Hacker Goes To Washington" and "Demystifying Weird Japanese Toys and Tools," it wasn't your typical Web 2.0 Expo material.

Conference representatives seem to think that the conference format still has life in it. "The expo itself is not going to change. I think the content changes from year to year based on what the trends are like and what the market looks like," TechWeb community manager Janetti Chon told CNET News. "We try to be the conference that appeals to all Web enthusiasts...of course the conference will evolve as the market and industry evolve." She does have a point. Web 2.0 Expo is so big and far-reaching that putting any kind of new spin on it would risk alienating some sector of attendees.

Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media, said in his address to the expo on Wednesday that the term "Web 2.0" was "never intended to be a version number." But maybe it should've been. With all this talk, finally, about putting old institutions to rest, maybe the digerati should consider taking the plunge and making our industry gatherings something truly new. If we're going to talk about a fresh start, there are a lot of things that can be done to make our events reflect it.

From what it sounds like, many of us are ready for it.

[Janerri317]

Caroline!

The halls may have seemed quieter because we offered so much activity at the conference that sometimes it competed with itself. Alongside the trade show we offered fun and creative special programs that you failed to point out:

Launch Pad Startup Demo Program
Sunlight Hackathon for government transparency
Tekzilla - internet TV filmed live
Web2Open our official unconference with speeddating QA sessions
Bloggers roundtable with Tim O'Reilly and Conference Chairs.
Government 2.0 open to all track

I'm sure there''s more I can't recall at this hour but I'll do a recap too and then we can discourse if we need a refresh or if we ARE actually refreshing.

happy weekend!
~ Janetti aka @janerri
Your friendly Web 2.0 Expo community manager

[cvaldes1831]

That's nice, but she was describing the lack of energy based on afterhours events, a time when practically all conference participants would be on their own free time. She wasn't commenting on attendance of the actual show.

Perhaps you can come up with a better excuse at the Web 3.0 conference.

[caroline.mccarthy]

there was a ton, obviously! as a happy (or just shameless) participant in the last Ignite NYC, I know there's loads of cool stuff going on and that O'Reilly/TechWeb tends to be very tapped into it. my beef with it is that I just don't know if the traditional expo/trade show format is the best way to bring all of it together. and I think that's a worthy subject of debate. discourse = always welcome!

Caroline

[cvaldes1831]

Personally, I think the traditional tradeshow format is a dinosaur and reached that status about ten years ago. Curiously, technology writers and conference organizers seem to be in denial about that.

Major game companies have pulled out of CES, Summer CES is long gone, E3 (its replacement) is a shadow of what it was once. Apple has pulled out of Macworld; Macworld Boston is pushing up daisies. The biggest computer tradeshow is the biggest casualty of them all: Comdex.

Can't you guys see the writing on the wall (actually ten foot tall graffiti)? Only highly focused events continue to thrive (e.g., Apple Worldwide Developer Conference).

"Web 2.0" is too loose of a concept to sustain. It has to be more like a Facebook Developers Conference, with the focus on plenty of detailed training sessions, not booth bunnies, free t-shirts, and parties.

[fugawe]

A true Web 2.0 conference wouldn't need "refresh." It should update dynamically.

[aceheaton]

Um... do you know what tantamount means? It means "the same as". Maybe you meant paramount. Next time you should try a two syllable word :)

[caroline.mccarthy]

you are correct, and I am well aware of the discrepancy between the two, and I'd like to say there's just often some collateral damage after a four-day fry-your-brain trade show. this is why diet mountain dew is not good for you, kids.

thanks!

[Cheese McBeese]

What? People had to do a bit of 'digging' (no pun intended) to find the best after-hours freeloading venues? I thought for sure they'd be tweeting their little brains out and moving from trough to trough like flocks of sheep.

Could it be that Web 2.0 Expo comes a little too closely on the heels of SXSW?

[moucon]

ALL tradeshows/conferences are suffering at the moment - so it doesn't surprise me this one was dead before/during/ or after hours. It's not the content or theme - it's just the economy. We do shows for other industries totally unrelated and it's the same scene every single time. This is a lousy time to do any kind of show other than a "Job Fair" - those are packed with lines around the block to get in.

[vineet957]

Nice story
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[Newrone]

When greater bandwidth is more widespread in North America, the benefits of Web2.0 and Rich Media will finally hit home. Then it will be initiative that is the key to who stands to profit.

The outside-the-box approach demonstrated here is good. I personally get tired of seeing unimaginative, self-important "suits" scattered throughout many an expo. Forward and lateral thinking go together in this sphere; if many chose rather not to be there, that's their problem.

But it's also what they BRING that makes an expo work and not only what they can take away from it. Perhaps here I'd agree with the concept of specifying the format more tightly - getting a higher turnstile count is not as important as getting valuable input from all comers.

Looking forward to the next one.
VoxAppeal.com

Great story, Caroline. You found some of the best nuggets that most journalists miss. I'm the co-chair of the event and 100% objective of course. ;-) I appreciate your calling out the sessions and events that help freshen the format. We strive to nourish the brain and the soul as well as the rolodex (to employ a true anachronism--sorry, I'm showing my age.) The thing about the trade show format is that it's not just old, it's ANCIENT. It's a modern version of the bazaar, which has been around since who knows when. What gives it an update in this era is the layer of media that surrounds and enhances it; today, traffic moves through a show floor partly based on tweets, blog posts, text messages, etc among attendees and exhibitors. But the core dynamics that develop in a bazaar or a trade show floor (the ways that you can easily see what others are interested in, the democratic aspects of it, the ability to easily get away and move on to the next thing if you're bored) are so valuable that they may be around forever. And for its intended purpose, it still works, or at least Web 2.0 Expo last week worked very well for the exhibitors trying to reach customers. We got enthusiastic and consistently positive feedback from our vendors. There ARE formats for connecting companies and customers (or press) that aren't a show floor; TechCrunch and DEMO for instance rely more on the pitch format and have greater structure that works very well for their purpose. For an event this size with this much breadth, that doesn't scale well, and it doesn't provide the one-on-one and the ability to self-select that supports a real sales process. However, I'd say that a lot of the work of a show organizer is to create the right environment, and Ignite etc are part of that environment. My approach is usually that the best technologies enhance or enable what?s eternally valuable, and face to face interaction has proven its value over the very long haul.

[vanraj1]

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