I’m having a good time at the Web 2.0 Conference. An observation: having really big business guys at a conference like this isn’t all that interesting. I mean, they’re smart people but because of competitive and legal reasons, they really can’t say much of anything interesting. Too often, Battelle asks pointed and interesting business questions that the business guy on the hot seat can’t actually answer. So, the entire conversation ends up being a pointless dance where the best you can hope for is an obtuse hint at some insight.

The geeks, on the other hand, especially the startup geeks, are much more interesting because people don’t actually try to ask them business questions… instead, they get asked their opinion on technology and trends which is quite valuable and actually much more relevant to the business folks in the room. Just a thought.

You should look to the ‘micro blog’ to the right for interesting companies and pages I’ve seen here or just check out my del.icio.us links tagged with web2con.

So far, my biggest takeaway is that APIs are the critical development enabling most Web 2.0 applications. True, user experience and Ajax and the various other things people talk about are important to the emerging applications, but at the end of the day the biggest change is the business change. APIs and applications like AdSense and AdWords allow business-to-business interactions on a different scale. With the right infrastructure (including Terms of Use), companies can allow the smallest company or an individual to sign up easily and create a business relationship with little effort.

Think about that for a second. When a large company like Ebay or Amazon might normally only have the manpower to do traditional deals with the top 5% of potential partners, those that will make them the most money, this model allows a small startup like Delicious Monster do an extensive integration with them.

I’m enjoying this phase of Internet development and I’m getting more ideas just being here.

Via Eschaton, I see that our estemed President is holding a prime time press conference tomorrow night to discuss his plans for Social Security and oil prices. Bush’s press conferences are like the proverbial train wreck. You want to turn away but you end up watching just to see what gruesome thing will come up next. The good thing for the President is that he’s gotten much more comfortable since he was reelected. The bad thing is that he still sucks at them.

I’m also interested, as always, in seeing what kind of questions he will get this time around, and which questions the plants in the press pool will ask. The trick is, of course, whether there are any differences between the general questions and the questions from those plants… the press has been extraordinarily deferential to Bush in these things, more so than they ever were under Clinton or G.H.W. Bush.