Web 2.0 Expo is a waste of time

There was a time, not took long ago, when this blogger was excited to attend Web 2.0 Expo. Now, having just reviewed the website for this year, over and over again, I can't find anything of interest to me.

Plus, in the interest of full disclosure, I asked for a press pass two years ago and was rebuffed rather rudely by Tim O'Reilly and his people. After that, and with the ever-growing tech world melding more with entertainment, there were other conferences and events to attend, so I did not care.

Moreover, now that my video-blog reach is much greater, I'm in better position to deliver a message to an audience, and I just plain don't give a you-know-what, I don't care about Web 2.0 Expo for another reason: it's so, well, Web 2.0 Expo. Here we are again with the mother of all "Let me dictate to you from a high platform" conferences that's not about real time interaction. That should be the focus. Where's Mark Cuban when you need him?



What I like about Jeff Pulver's 140 Conference concept is that it's based on talk and real time interaction. And in the interest of full disclosure, I've not yet attended one of his conferences but a lot of my friends and associates have, and from the massive number of tweets I've received, I feel like I was at the New York Conference, even as I was in NYC for the 2010 NFL Draft. Props to Jeff.

Plus, Jeff Pulver is a cool guy.  This I can say from personal experience.

So that's why I'm just not excited about Web 2.0 Expo and will not even spend a dime or ask for any kind of pass this year. It's an old formula and reeks of a kind of selectivity that makes me ask "Who the heck are you to tell me..." in this case, about the "Power of Platforms."

What's really awful is that after being really interesting Web 2.0 Expo has settled into the same tired pattern that repeats itself again and again: someone talking to you about Facebook and Social Media without us talking about how all of this impacts media and about what new platforms are out there.

In other words the innovation climate once a part of Web 2.0 Expo is just gone. Moreover, O'Reilly Media shows that it doesn't really know what it's doing here by using "certain" platforms and not as many as possible. For example, the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco webpage has just one video platform, and that's Blip.tv. I love Blip.tv, but No YouTube or Vimeo, and no Tubemogul? Thats crazy!

Using Tubemogul would automatically mean Web 2.0 Expo videos were on many different video platforms and not just one. "Power of Platforms?" Right. Sure. Okay.

And that's what really bugs me about Tim O'Reilly's approach: the overwhelming need to select "who gets in" and "what is used" which runs counter to the social media best practice of having a "mark" in every platform territory not just to get the message out, but also to block the chance some mean person will set up their own Web 2.0 Expo video channel on some place Tim and his people overlooked because it didn't matter to them or they just didn't know about it.

Like, er, YouTube. While O'Reilly Media has its own channel, you'd think they'd have one for Web 2.0 right? Well as of this writing, no they don't. Check the YouTube search for Web 2.0 Expo now (this could change after the release of this blog) and we find O'Reilly Media and a bunch of totally boring videos; no Web 2.0 Expo channel.

And no video-bloggers running around capturing cool stuff. Like, my video from the Reddit party in 2007:



Trouble is Reddit was new then and is still very relevant, but not to O'Reilly Media, which doesn't even use Reddit on its website. (There's that selectivity crap again.) Where's the party for the next great startup? I guess I'll have to wait for TechCrunch's next event.

Stay tuned.