Web 2.0 Comes to Northern Virginia

On Wednesday, I’ll be blogging The New New Internet Conference on Web 2.0 for Business in lovely Tysons Corner, Virginia for two reasons.

First and foremost: relative to coverage of Web 2.0 in the consumer space, I’ve seen much less discussion of Web 2.0 applications for business — other than endless coverage of the emergent competiton between Google and Microsoft for business productivity applications. Beyond word processing and spreadsheets, there is a wide world of business applications ripe for the same kind of disruption that has turned the word of consumer media on its head.

When I give talks about blogging to publishers and journalists, I always begin by explaining that a blog is just a publishing platform — the blogging revolution began with the technology — simple, lightweight, flexible, extensible, and fully netowrked. When people look beyond the hype over what’s been done with the technology (e.g. ranting political blogs) and understand what the technology itself does and what it can enable, there’s typically an “Aha” moment.

The other day, I was talking to the former head of operations for a major news and information site — he made a wistful reference to how much easier everything might have been if the entire publishing operation had been built on WordPress rather than a cumbersome, overly complex first-generation content management system. For the business of publishing, blogging software, simple as it is, is completely disruptive. The same 2.0 software design philosophies promise to be equally disruptive for other business applications.

The second reason I’m going is that opportunities to attend a Web 2.0 conference in driving distance from my home don’t come along as often as I’d like — but there is life outside CA.