the ryan king

So, it’s been few days since Web2Con ended and I haven’t had a chance to express my thoughts about the conference.

First of all, met me say that I got to meet a lot of interesting people: David Heinemeier Hanson, Matt Cutts, Kris Krug, Mark Nottingham and many others that I can’t think of right now (but who are somewhere in my address book). So, yeah, there were a lot of cook geeks there who do some really interesting work. However, the makeup of the conference-goers kind of surprised me.

Why’d it surprise me? Well, there were lots of suits there. I’m used to conferences which consist of all geeks plus a few clueful business-types and VCs. However, Web2Con seemed to be mostly for (and by) business-types.*

Even the content was business-oriented- I mean, come on, Barry Diller? He’s Web 2.0?!?**

This brings me back to my working-theory going into the conference.

My theory is this: there’s really two things going on here, a movement and a reaction. First, the movement is a reassertion of control by geeks. Several years of a down-turned economy has given geeks plenty of time to reflect and turn their energies toward things they care about. So, Web 2.0 can be viewed as a geek rebellion- people are developing software and media for themselves and on their own terms.***

Due to this movement, many who otherwise have been quite influential- MSM folks, VCs, etc. are seeing that their role in the new economy, which we’ll call Web 2.0, is not as important as it has heretofore been.

So, Web2Con can be seen as a manifestation of this reaction – a way for business people to come and try to figure out what’s going on and how they can be a part of it.

I may be wrong about this, but I haven’t seen anyone else explain what’s going on from this perspective, so I wanted to throw it out there as a possible explanation.

* In retrospect, the price-tag should have clued me into the potential attendees.

** If he had a homepage, I’d post him to Web 2 Or Not DOT com and let the people decide. But he’s not Web2 enough to have blog or even a homepage.

***37Signals Less style would be a good example.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 11:52 pm.