Or, how I learned stop worrying and love the future at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 15 to 18

I’m pretty much a sucker for anything with “two-point-oh” (”2.0″) in the title. At this point it’s almost embarrassing. It comes from the fact that I was once on staff at the trendy business news magazine, “Business 2.0,” where we embraced (and pimped) the so-called New Economy and made up all sort of new rules to go with it. It was 2.0 tons of fun.

The New Economy didn’t quite pan out the way our little cabal of idealists had envisioned, but there’s still a lot to it. Take this whole Web 2.0 thing. Some say that Web 2.0 is to the Internet what string theory is to physics—a pretty theory that can’t be proven in practice. I ought to be jaded about it, but actually I’m pretty jazzed.

Web 2.0, to borrow lingo from the fellow who first coined the term, “is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Yep, that’s a nice sounding theory all right. But in practice it means enabling users to do their thing—create new content and communities of interest through wikis, blogging, social bookmarking, v-casting and the whole plethora of social media—while learning to make a buck or two off of it where you can. It’s not unlike selling picks and shovels to gold miners. Got a problem with that? Then move back to the Soviet Union, pal.

Anyway, this is a round-about way to get you excited about next week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, where you’ll be able to learn some of the tricks of the Web 2.0 trade from some of the best 2.0 minds. This is not your ordinary theory conference, but a get-your-hands dirty, networking-heavy, learning confab-gabfest designed to show you where the Web is going and, possibly, where the money is going, too. Highlights and Yahoo! appearances include: 

Sunday

• High Performance Webpages (Workshop) with Steve Souders (Yahoo!)
  Tenni Theurer (Yahoo!)

Monday

• The People Formerly Known as the Audience with Heather Champ (Flickr) and Derek Powazek (Blogger, Technorati)
• Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media with Charlene Li (Forrester Research), Gabe Rivera (TechMeme), Ted Shelton (The Personal Bee)—who I went to high school with—and Rich Skrenta (Topix)
• Local Search Marketing: Let’s Get Small with LeeAnn Prescott (Hitwise)
  Jennifer Black (Local.com), Perry Evans (Local Matters),  Kendall Fargo (Intuit) and
  Frazier Miller (Yahoo! Local)

Tuesday

• Building Awesome Web Sites & Services Using the Power of Happy Users with Ted Rheingold (Dogster), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter (Yahoo!),  Biz Stone (Obvious)
• Social Networking Winners & Losers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with Charlene Li (Forrester), Gina Bianchini (Ning), Matt Cohler (Facebook), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Mike Speiser (Yahoo!)

Wednesday

• Jeff Weiner in Conversation with John Battelle with (surprise) Jeff Weiner (Yahoo!) and John Battelle (Program Chair, Web 2.0 Conference; Federated Media Publishing)
• The Social Media Revolution: You Oughta Be in Pictures (and Podcasting, and Vlogging) with Jeremiah Owyang (PodTech.net), Robert Scoble (PodTech), Thomas Hawk (Zooomr), Chris Pirillo (LockerGnome)

Be sure and visit us at booth #307 and see you there.

Oh, and for the ultra hip here’s a tip: check out Web 2.0pen. 

—Michael Mattis