Category: Site Related

We invited a lot of press and bloggers, so I expect there will be plenty of places to grok the goings on. In fact, you might start with Google News, and perhaps check out who’s linking to us over at Feedster. Andy, Ross, Jeff, Wade, and I am sure others will also be blogging it. We’ll also put a link to all the coverage on the main site, once the event gets going.

I’m excited that this event, which began as an idea Tim and I shared nearly a year ago, is actually happening, and is so well attended. We hoped for 400-500, and we have more than 550 registered (yes, you can still come, but today is the deadline for the pre-show price. Walk in tix are quite dear). We hoped for 5-6 sponsors, and we have 15. And much of the support came in the last couple of months, as momentum built. It’s been a great education preparing for this. Thanks to everyone who is coming, and to all you Searchbloggers for putting up with my absence. There will be a killer search panel on Weds afternoon, and some news on search from Bill Gross, Yahoo, and others – so stay tuned!

I’m talking about the emergence of what I’ve started to call Web 2.0, the internet as platform. We heard about that idea back in the late 90s, at the height of the browser wars, but that turned out to be a false alarm. But I believe we’re now starting the third age of the internet — the first being the telnet-era command line internet, the second the web — and the third, well, that tale grows in the telling. It’s about the way that open source and the open standards of the web are commoditizing many categories of infrastructure software, driving value instead to the data and business processes layered on top of (or within) that software; it’s about the way that web sites like eBay, Amazon, and Google are becoming platforms with rich add-on developer communities; it’s about the way that network effects and data, rather than software APIs, are the new tools of customer lock-in; it’s about the way that to be successful, software today needs to work above the level of a single device; it’s about the way that the Microsofts and Intels of tomorrow are once again going to blindside established players because all the rules of business are changing.

Time and again as I report in this space, I’m struck by how different this time round is from the late 1990s. For example, today I spoke with Jeff Weber, who runs USAToday’s digital publishing efforts, and we had a robust conversation about publishing models, new and old. I was part of the first wave of “new media” in the 90s, and we were convinced that the world was changing, but wrong in the timing and execution. Now, a whole host of “lightweight publishers” have sprung up, and they are challenging and undermining the entire cost structure and business model of old line publishers. This time, it’s real. Weber pointed out to me that Yahoo News, which is twice as big as USAToday.com, and has just 11 employees. Then there’s craigslist, with more traffic than nearly anyone, and only 20 or so employees. How do they do that? They’ve got a very Web 2.0, lightweight business model, that’s how (and Yahoo aggregates content, then creates interfaces, of course). Over and over, in so many aspects of industry, we see this happening – travel, finance, media, entertainment, retail. It’s exciting, and it’s fun.