It is about 1:46 a.m. as I start this post on my attendance at 2.0 Expo San Francisco. I have given a quick look at the coverage elsewhere of it, which seems to note that it is indeed smaller and more subdued compared to past gatherings in keeping with the flaccidness of the overall economy. Even refreshments were dispensed grudgingly and in niggardly amounts. Welcome to the age of diminished expectations. It probably was a mistake on the part of O’Reilly Media to tar the conference with the rather downbeat slogan of, The Power of Less — which ranks as one of the most uninspiring call to arms ever issued.

Nevertheless, I am delighted to be here and only wish that there were a much more robust presence of the healthcare and library sectors, Science 2.0 and the education community. This is a space we need to make our presence felt in and a learning community in which we need to participate. This means you medical librarians, librarians of all types, Science 2.0 bloggers, healthcare administrators and healthcare journalists and marketers, those in healthcare IT and informatics, biotech and big pharma and the world of foundations, small nonprofits, government at all levels, university research administration and any and all teachers at any level from elementary to graduate schools. It is just such a shame that we are all laboring under every dwindling allotments for business travel. This is really a conference that should be attended if you can possibly swing it.

I have been impressed by the quality and newsworthiness of what I have seen some far and kept thinking of the many professions that would benefit from attending this conference. Basically, anyone who has anything to do with even the most rudimentary of Web sites–which these days encompasses small businesses down to the florist shop on the corner. And certainly those in the search industry should be here given how much info is being given to attendees about rendering Web sites maximally searchable.

I can barely write coherently because I am so eager to get this story posted. I rarely use words like “awesome” and “mind-blowing”—but the session I attended yesterday, Watching Websites: A Report from the Frontlines of Web Monitoring was fascinating and sobering. If you are in any sort of business, the forthcoming book Watching Websites will be must reading, I suspect. How weird then (considering that we are dealing with a media company here, O’Reilly no less) that that you have to drill down among several different sites to find hard and fast info on it. Start here, anyway: http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/detail/5693

The presenters of the workshop made a cogent, compelling argument for the sophisticated use of Web analytics for anyone who runs a Web site—which is a huge number of people nowadays not just techies. Presenter Alistair Croll discoursed fascinatingly on the use of the Google Analytics URL Builder
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578
for stealth marketing, reputation tracking and site monitoring. Frankly, much of what he said was over my head. But I got, “URLs are the new cookies” and that the founders of companies like TinyURL are going to retire rich after their firms are acquired.

These two guys, Croll and Sean Power, struck me as brilliant and incredibly knowledgeable. Let us hope that their forthcoming book gets marketed better than has been the case up to this point. Like, say, how about something as basic as a flyer, guys, and stacks of business cards at the ready for attendees? To do them justice, though, they said that that so much has been happening in this space that they had been revising their presentation up to the very last moment. Watch for this book. More later—this was just the first half of the first day.

One comment—the security presence was quite oppressive. Maybe that is just life in big cities these days. I am from a small town in Oregon so perhaps I live in blissful ignorance of the need for hyper-vigilance in major metros. But should I really be waved off from approaching a customer service man by a beefy security guard and not allowed to go to the media room though I had only just been issued my press pass and told to go to the media room? This wasn’t Fort Knox—this was a Web 2.0 conference. Web 2.0 is totally about openness.

Still, everyone in healthcare should add the Web 2.0 Expo to the list of conferences they should attend. Indeed, I would say that there was much less hype at this conference and more of value to serious businesspeople in healthcare at Web 2.0 than at the Health 2.0 conferences: http://health2con.com valuable though those too are. I would argue that attendance at both for everyone in healthcare and science from the solo nurse practitioner to the Open Science lab scientist at a well endowed lab is well worth the hefty price of admission.

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