Web 2.0 show is too small for its britches

Don't accuse Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle of elitism.

In organizing the Web 2.0 Summit (previously known as Web 2.0 Conference), they created an event showcasing technologies inherently associated with open access and empowered community. But they made it an invite-only event, limiting the number of attendees and press to keep it "intimate," as one insider explained on Tuesday, the opening day of the three-day San Francisco event. The organizers are obviously hip to the economics of scarcity under which making it hard to get in only increases the allure.

The event, put on by publisher O'Reilly Media and CMP Technology and hosted by John Battelle, blogger and founder of the dot-com magazine phenom The Industry Standard, turned away about 5,000 wanna-be attendees, Battelle said in opening remarks. About 1,000 people were at the sold-out show, an O'Reilly representative said.

The invite-only policy angered some, who unleashed their fury in blog postings.

But now, show organizers have solved the problem. They announced on Tuesday that they have created a new, bigger event--dubbed Web 2.0 Conference--that will be held at San Francisco's Moscone convention center in April. That way they appease the masses clamoring for some of the action and boost their coffers without having to change the original event.

You can't have two events with the same name, so they have changed the name of the smaller event to "Web 2.0 Summit," which harkens back to the exclusive "Internet Summit" Battelle organized while at The Industry Standard. Let's hope this summit is around longer than that one was.