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Web 2.0 Conference week starts tomorrow

Because Web 2.0 is the meme of the moment, even amongst those who are cynical of the term, next week is shaping up to be a very exciting one.
Written by Richard MacManus, Contributor

Because Web 2.0 is the meme of the moment, even amongst those who are cynical of the term, next week is shaping up to be a very exciting one. The 2nd annual Web 2.0 Conference is being held in San Francisco from Wednesday to Friday and I've made a special trip over from New Zealand to be here for it (paid for by me, I should add). The conference is already sold out, which indicates just how popular Web 2.0 has become. The theme of this year's conference is "Revving The Web", which means:

"...focusing on the services, applications, businesses, and models that are reshaping the Internet, particularly for media and entertainment, communications and mobile, policies and legal issues, and the concept of the web OS."

For some background reading on the theory of Web 2.0, I highly recommend you read Tim O'Reilly's essay What is Web 2.0

Conferences are good places to make big announcements. So what are some of the business and web app announcements we can expect this coming week? As I mentioned last week on Read/WriteWeb, Newsgator will be making an acquisition announcement at the conference and Moreover.com is expected to be acquired very soon. Yahoo will probably be unveiling a Blog Search product, according to BusinessWeek. 

I'm sure there will be other big announcements. Perhaps even from Microsoft, at least if Robert Scoble has his way. He wants to make a Web 2.0 acquisition for Microsoft (if Bill or Steve give him the company checkbook):

"Sorry, I can't identify what I'm thinking of here, but promise you, it's a big deal and will help solve some things we aren't going to solve in Windows Vista, either. Gotta move fast, things are gonna happen at the Web 2.0 conference, next week, that will make the deal harder to make happen (and will make you look less brilliant if you do the deal afterward than before)."

I'm sure he's being tongue-in-cheek, but it is fascinating to speculate on who Microsoft could acquire to ramp up their Web 2.0 status. Rafat at PaidContent.org suggests 37Signals - "mainly for the team but also for the tools they've developed". Commenters on the 37Signals blog have suggested a range of companies/products - such as Flock, Feedburner, 43Things, Jotspot, Technorati. Reg Cheramy thinks it may be Morfik, a new company out of Australia which has developed a "Javascript Synthesis Technology (‘JST’) that allows developers to use a visual design environment and a high-level language of their choice to create applications comprised purely of HTML and Javascript." I don't know much about Morfik yet, but they're one of the sponsors of the Web 2.0 Conference and so we'll find out more this week.

Whatever the announcements in the coming week, it's going to be a very interesting time! Keep an eye on your favorite Web 2.0 blogs for all the latest.

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