Tom Conrad & Michael Arrington - the passion of Web 2.0
I sat down for my bag lunch at Web 2.0 Summit next to Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora. The Palace is packed with C level execs. Jonathan Hochman, a Wikipedia veteran, said 'if everyone here shut down their web site it would be the end of the internet."
I asked Tom what he thought would come of Tim O'Reilly's call to "work on stuff that matters," in these difficult times. Tom said that after the .com bubble burst people worked on things they had a passion for. But, and he laughed a little, the things people had a passion for turned out to be quite quirky from some perspectives e.g. exploring the possibilities in aggregating a bunch of book marks.
One good thing, Tom noted, that might come out of the current shake down of the whole business world, which is not just a .com collapse this time, is a return to the kind of passionate, collaborative idea hatching that went on in Michael Arrington's backyard, back in the day. This was what produced so much of what we know as Web 2.0 today. And a return to that modus operandi, perhaps, would not be a bad thing. Oh the press room is full of A list bloggers too - will post some more pics tomorrow.
