Last week I skipped out of work for a few hours to hang at Web 2.0 Expo which was promoted by Dave McClure.

I had to scum a coupon code from Scott which was making the rounds, when I asked Dave a few months back, he was not very forthcoming. Maybe he misunderstood that all I wanted was a free pass to the convention floor; maybe he was afraid that I’d “hurl up my Lunch 2.0.”

[My day at the Expo after the jump]

What I missed

I missed Jeremiah “lifecasting” it. That could have been a fun reprise to the time I walked by Justin.TV.

After hearing about the shellacking John Battelle gave to the Eric Schmidt concerning the doubleclick buyout, I’m glad I was too sick to piss on the verbal hand job I’m told he gave Bill Gross that day at Books Inc. (Sorry John, I’m from Caltech. I have my reasons for having my opinions about Bill Gross, IdeaLab! and Overture: maybe a future rant.)

Now some may say that this is sour grapes because I have it in for Google. And to be honest: guilty as charged. But Googlers, You realize that when your CEO says shit like this:

“The other thing is a new architecture has emerged that is technically known as LAMP. LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP Perl Python. In vernacular it’s known as Web 2.0.”
—Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, on NPR

it’s really hard to greet Google as liberators and shower Schmidt with candy and flowers. Didn’t you learn something from the last seven years of this country’s highest executive? Putting a boring idiot who talks out of his ass in charge is a just going to make everyone hate you.

Why I liked the expo

David Kellogg asked me why I liked the Expo even though the pass we got just entitled us to see some people pitch shit that we don’t need (both in the talks and on the conference floor), and there was no good schwag (we got the double rejection for the free conference t-shirt: him because he worked at Yahoo! which was a conference sponsor; me because I showed up too late and somehow blew the quota of free stuff they had for “losers with the free conference tag”).

I’d say that I love the concept which is basically: If the web is really a platform then why isn’t there a conference for it like MacWorld or JavaOne or other real platforms? Conferences like OSCON are too geeky and Web 2.0 summit are too exclusive to be counted. We really need a Web 2.0 Expo.

My day at the expo

Basically I spent the couple of hours I was there harshing on everyone at all the booths and otherwise acting like one big asshole.

In other words, being my normal self.

I thought the little booths were much more fun than the big ones, though I seriously wonder how many of these companies will be around next year. I should have picked up a conference program so I could make a death pool.

We finished with a trip to Starbucks (the special was a double thin vanilla latté something-or-other which I had to order because I am totally susceptible to the the power of suggestions written on chalkboards). I then walked David back to to the train station and hopped on a random bus that seemed to be heading in the general direction of work.

On the bus, I belatedly chatted up the girl sitting next to me who had these very beautiful blue-green eyes. It is the unfortunate part of the male psyche that our discussion on a crowded bus heading to Chinatown about the book she was reading and our mutual bad habit of reading the backs of cereal boxes and shampoo bottles marked the most memorable thing that happened to me that day.