John Dvorak wouldn’t get any page views if he said “X was OK”, so in typical fashion he bashes Web 2.0 Expo although he probably spent all of 10 minutes on the premises.
His main thesis is that it was full of 20-29 year olds all wanting to get rich quick.
I was there this year, and found the opposite. Most of the people I met were on the other side of 30.
That being said, I also thought that the Web 2.0 Expo was poor. The core problem is that I wasn’t the target audience of the event. I would like some content with my talks. Here we saw classics such as “widgets are cool. come getsome” and “blogs are a good thing” and “collaboration wins”.
As I flicked through the sessions, I saw a paltry few that I would like to attend. It would be nice to go to the Django talk. Brad on the Dojo Offline Toolkit… sure. Erm, hmm. What else?
I was hoping that the event would be tech heavy, and all about pushing the boundaries of what we somehow call Web 2.0. Instead, it was a set of intro courses.
A lot of people were there though, so maybe the bulk of people liked it. Many of the audience seemed to be very light on technical backgrounds and more “I want to somehow be involved in Web 2.0″.
I enjoyed the usual though… seeing old friends who popup at these things. The conferences within the conferences. That is why people enjoy the unconferences these days. They make the “chatting in the halls” the conference itself.
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I felt the same way about the Web2.0 conference — a bit disappointing. Since I’m a developer as well, I was really hoping for some meat in the presentations rather than glittering generalities (or a sales pitch).
The other surprise for me, which is similar to what you commented on, was the community roundtable, which was a very interesting, yet informal, cross-functional discussion – it was probably the most enjoyable part of the show. I was also glad to meet some of the folks from the Adobe Flex/Apollo team.
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:38 am
Dion, very cool embedded feed reader you created (a few blog posts up). I was disappointed in the Web 2.0 conference too — it felt super slimy to me, too many card sharks walking around. Hey, I put up a Flash video version of the speech I gave here if you are interested: http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=427145
Cheers,
Brad