Web 2.0 Summit Wrap-up
Read/WriteWeb's Web 2.0 Summit coverage sponsored by Yahoo! — It's the end of a hectic week of conference-going for your R/WW correspondent - and so time for a wrap-up of my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Summit. Firstly, my overriding feeling is that this year's conference was a lot different from last year's.
Context & Ripple Effects
Read/WriteWeb closes out its Yahoo!-sponsored Web 2.0 Summit coverage with a verdict that this year's conference was 'a lot different' from last year's — a notable reversal after October 2005, when Web 2.0 naysaying hit an all-time high and year-end lists like the best Web 2.0 software of 2005 were still arguing the label's legitimacy.
The sponsor choice cuts against the grain of Yahoo's own year: confirmed reporting through mid-2006 shows weak search-advertising revenue, shares touching near two-year lows, a delayed search-revenue project, and continued trailing of Google in search — offset partly by a July 2006 deal to embed Yahoo services on tens of millions of Motorola phones, and an as-yet unconfirmed report of Yahoo flirting with an AOL arrangement. GigaOM running its own best-and-worst rundown the same week shows how widely the summit now travels.
First-order effects
- Yahoo buys narrative adjacency to the year's defining industry conversation through its sponsorship of Read/WriteWeb's coverage, even as its confirmed search-advertising results trail Google's.
- The wrap-up's claim that the summit differed sharply from 2005 marks the conference's shift from the skepticism peak of late 2005 toward an established industry fixture.
Second-order effects
- With rival outlets like GigaOm publishing competing summit recaps in the same window, a single sponsorship no longer owns the post-conference narrative, pressuring sponsors to spread spending across multiple commentary channels.
- Yahoo's Motorola embedding deal points to a compensation pattern: where it cannot win queries against Google, it buys distribution at the device layer instead.
Third-order effects
- If incumbents keep funding the commentary layer around the events they most need to shape, conference coverage drifts toward sponsored media — an early template for the tech content-marketing model.
- The 'Web 2.0' tag hardens from blog shorthand into a calendared industry institution whose framing is contested between independent analysts and paying sponsors.
The trend: Tech conferences are turning into sponsored-media events where pressured incumbents purchase standing in the very debates their product results are losing.