Web 2.0 Conference, first day impressions

What a day, I spent most of it running from one conference room to another, crowding into workshop rooms that were chock full, and trying to work out which people I knew via blogging. Being from New Zealand, I haven't put a name to the face of most bloggers. Today I managed to improve my blogger-face-to-name ratio, but I still have a lot of work to do.

In the morning I went to the Open Source Infrastructure workshop - nicely moderated by Marc Canter. A lot of great ideas in that workshop, which I will write more about when I get time. Then I went to the 'Web 2.0 Ad Models: A New Approach to Marketing?' panel, which Jeff Jarvis moderated. That was a good discussion of ad models in the Web 2.0 era, including metrics, new media advertising models and RSS advertising. In the afternoon I went to Yahoo's 'What's New in the Search Ecosystem: Users, Publishers, and Advertisers' and a workshop on Mash-Up business models. I intend to analyze all of those workshops in due course, but in the meantime I've posted real-time notes for a couple of them on my personal blog.

In the general introduction, Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle made for an informative and entertaining duo on the main stage. They gave an overview of Web 2.0 and talked about "innovation in display" and assembly. A lot of companies at the conference will show off those things here - basically what companies are doing with the web platform. Issues that will be addressed during the conference include open vs closed, data models, future of entertainment, young users just coming to the platform.

I'll post more on Day 2.

ZDNet's Dan Farber is also blogging from the conference.

Photo Gallery: Web 2.0 Conference 2005