Two Days at Web 2.0

There's a lot of star power here at Web 2.0 but no one rivals Lou Reed, who played a half hour set after the AOL-sponsored dinner this evening.  While the conference is certainly interesting, I personnally feel like a fish out of water as the audience is largely West Coast and there is only small handful of financial services people here.  Most of the companies attending are b2c and many of the presenters are from media companies: Steve Berkowitz from MSN; Barry Diller from IAC; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. from the NY Times; Jim Zanzone of Ask.com; Ross Levinsohn from News Corp; Jonathan Miller from AOL; Eric Nicoli from EMI.  The workshops I selected Tuesday morning were disappointing: first there was a panel on Enterprise 2.0 which was so flat that one of the panelists was typing away on his Blackberry; this was followed by a panel called "Whose Data Is It" which couldn't keep me in the room.  So what was good so far other than Lou Reed?  Jeff Jonas of IBM gave a great 10 minutes presentation on how queries are data.  (He was talking so fast I couldn't take good notes but if they post his slides I'll be able to elaborate in a future post.)  Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley also had 10 great minutes; hopefully they'll post her slides soon.  John Batelle interviewed Eric Schmidt of Google; Barry Diller and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (together); Jonathan Miller; and Ray Ozzie of Microsoft.  All of these were fun and informative.  Mark Benioff spoke about salesforce.com mash-ups and Joi Ito explained the addictive environment called World of Warfare.  These were great sessions. I missed Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Bruce Chizen of Adobe but heard they were both excellent.  More tomorrow...