John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly opened the second edition of the Web 2.0 conference this afternoon with an exchange along these lines: Battelle said that last year, the mood at the conference was simply, "We made it" -- we survived the Internet industry's dark winter. This year, he said, it's more like, "Something really important is going on -- let's not screw it up." O'Reilly added: "We are definitely running the risk of another hype cycle."
I'd say it's no longer a risk, it's a reality. It's too late in the evening to post too much about what I saw and heard today at -- more tomorrow. But let's just say that the whiff of bubble-mania that was in the air at the conference's first edition a year ago has now blossomed into a heady eau de dot-com.
The conference mixes up idealistic developers who have worked themselves half-blind coding the next super-cool but not-quite-usable-yet Web applications with sharp-eyed financiers looking for the next big thing that they can flip fast for a killing. In this regard, Web 2.0 -- both the conference and the vague but real thing it is named for -- is like the bastard offspring of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and the tech-investment gatherings of yore.
I do not know what will come of this not-so-holy union, but from the feel of things at the Hotel Argent today, it seems likely that a certain number of people will get rich, a certain amount of money will be wasted, several important new companies and technologies will emerge and some indeterminate number of investors will be fleeced. So that means it's probably too late, John and Tim -- the hype-cycle wheel is already in spin, up, up, up.
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