Visualization of Interests at Web 2.0 Summit

To help make the most of this week's Web 2.0 Summit, I wanted to understand the overall audience gestalt - what are the broad themes, interests, and ideas that are important to the people going to the conference? A tag cloud can be a great (but admittedly imperfect!) way to understand these large patterns quickly, so I used a spider to collect a list of keyword meta tags from the various organizations represented at the conference. Here's what I got when I fed them into Wordle:

As in most tag clouds, the largest categories ("Online," "Business", "News," and "Management") are not nearly as interesting as the smaller ones. For example:

• Words like "storage," "data," and "hosting" reinforce the importance of operational competence. (And why we run the Velocity Conference).
• "Search," "advertising," and "marketing" illustrate some of the business models in play, and "banking," "equity," and "venture" represent some of the investors.
• "Content" makes a strong showing, with "Video" beating out "book" by a wide margin. This idea of the changing nature of content is also explored in next February's Tools of Change conference.
• Rich internet application themes emerges from words like "design," "interactive," and "usability."
• At least a few Radar trends, including "biology" emerged. (Of course, so did "baby," so there's obviously only so far this type of tool can go!)
• The diversity of people and companies also emerged, with tags like "insurance," "movies," "art," "travel," "investing," "music," and "science" woven throughout the larger ideas.

So, in all, it looks like many of the themes outlined in the orginal What is Web 2.0 article are still alive and well, but are now reflecting the content types, business models, and interests of a maturing online media universe. Should be a fascinating few days!

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