Of Techcrunch, Bubbles, and Web2.0
Techcrunch #5 was even bigger than #3 — nearly 400 people on about as miserable a day as you can find in Northern California.
Lots of recap on the event from the big bloghonchos in attendance: Arrington, Scoble, Clavier, Winer, and many more. Scoble and Shel Israel signed their new book, Naked Conversations, for hours on end — banking a lot more than AdSense would generate.
Fairly incredible that an innocent backyard bbq could morph into a massive new media juggernaut.
I am not buying into the bubble theory. There is a subtle shift going on and it is creativity that is at a premium. Web2.0 may have been twisted into a marketing meme, but there is some real collaboration and sharing going on. Reminds me of the pre-Web1.0 days when people wanted to “swap links.” Now it is about having applications play together which is following the script to a tee, but it is very real. I had Chris Messina from Flock extolling microformats, Leonard Lin of upcoming.org offering to make sure his feeds function well in 30boxes, and Dudley Carr of gtalkr talk to me about our apps playing together, all in the span of 10 minutes.