All right, here it is... the first chance I've had to blog since the conference began. I guess that's the difficulty with getting to know people who live in town! Between family, the founders of The Next Web Conference and many attendees, I'm very much in good company. I barely had a moment to sit down until this evening and that was at an Irish pub to watch the final game of the World Cup.

Enough with the excuses & on to the good stuff: the Next Web agenda. Our first speaker was Tim Roe, Head of Data Analytics at Nielsen/NetRatings. Tim covered the state of the web today, especially information that pertains to the EU. According to Nielsen data, european net usage is growing at over twice the rate of America's with over 120 million users and more every day. Germany wins first place for access with 60% of the total population online.  Not surprisingly, search is the biggest activity of internet users. Google represents Europe's most popular online brand with over 26% growth in the last year alone.

A consistent theme for the day was the new mobility of the web - growing mobile technologies and greater mobile access. We later heard from WidSets, a Web 2.0 company partnering with Nokia to bring web widgets, RSS, and much more to compatible mobile phones. Tim reports that access from places other than work or at the office is growing, but Nielsen has yet to collect data on net connections via mobile phones.  Others also reported on the underused and untapped potential of mobile access.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch acknowledged that trends are moving away from UGC toward mobile applications that include embracing the web as an OS and tearing down the walls that today limit desktop computing. He was a staunch defender of Web 2.0, though he only used the term once in reluctant deference to O'Reilly's copyright of "Web 2.0" for conference use.

Both Michael Arrington and Kevin Kelly, who was the final keynote speaker, defended recycling ideas and technology as a way of forward evolution online. I agree, because frankly I'm tired of people whining about how a Web 2.0 company has "been done before" as if they live in a box and don't realize that this is how commerce, history, and life progress.

Michael gave us his top 10 startups, with a steep disclaimer and slight European bias. They were: AllPeers, bebo, facebook, last.fm (though he thinks pandora is better), netvibes, riya, wikio, youtube, zlango, and (#1) digg.  The founders of several of these companies presented during the day, including netvibes, AllPeers, digg, and eSnips, which was a runner-up to the top 10. Kevin Rose of digg was scheduled to speak about "the power of social bookmarking and non-heirarchical editorial control" but couldn't make it to the conference so instead the moderator spoke with Jay Adelson via live video chat.

Steven Pemberton, an awesome guy who basically invented the internet, presented the symantic origins of Web 2.0 in a humorous speech justifying the creation of new words to describe abstract concepts. Because he's a web interface guru, he shared his predictions of what the future will hold: Web applications developed using declarative markups to simplify and compact code, decrease debugging time, and create accessible, reusable, and device-independent web software.

Both Steven and Kevin Kelly spoke very optimistically about the future of the web, citing the effect of Moore's Law on internet-related growth trends. Food for thought from them both includes the following:

• The Web is only 4,000 days old and what we've accomplished today was previously considered an impossibility
• It's likely that changes over the next 4,000 days will be 10x as great as changes leading to this point
• Nothing is growing faster on this planet than information
• Information is growing at 66% a year versus physical production at 7%  (Again, Moore's Law)
• One of today's computers is more powerful than ALL the computers used to first put man on the moon

Mark Tluszcz of Mangrove Capital Partners, the VCs who funded Skype, was equally positive. Though Europe has only a fraction of the investment activity of the US and is, according to him, 15-20 years behind, recent successes bode well for the industry. Provided that European Web 2.0 firms use English, they can be as competitive as any firm in the US. I'm not sure I've seen signs pointing toward major successes from Eastern Europe, but Mark predicts that we'll see a few BIG tech hits coming out of that area in the next few years. It's good for Mangrove, which follows early-adopters and paradigm-breaking companies. If this is the tip of the iceberg, perhaps there's only good things to come for European VC and Web 2.0 firms.

If not, well, it might be better (or just safer) to stay one step behind to get ahead. The speaker after Mark, Paul Molenaar from Ilse media, pretty much slammed Web 2.0. I was surprised, being as his company is  the biggest Dutch online publisher. In fact, I'm still not sure if he was being serious or not when he said he'd rather go back to a walled garden approach. Nevertheless, I suppose it was good to have a grain of salt to go with the rest of the conference.

There are, of course, positives and negatives to all new evolutions. The new web is accessed by an extreme diversity of users with a diversity of devices. Cost is going down, while bandwidth and penetration are increasing. In fact, Kevin Kelly described "The Next Web" as a combination of physical objects and internet technology. Essentially, things with the language of the web embedded into them... like clothing with RFIDs programmed to tell your washing machine which cycle to use, et cetera. Apparently I wasn't the only one this squicked, as the questions at the end of his speech moved quickly from his optimism to talk about Machine domination like in The Matrix.

People are concerned with privacy moreso with legality (though they did ask about copyright laws when eSnips and AllPeers presented). For example, while the audience was excited about Plazes,another promising startup that uses connectivity information to detect location and connect users,  it was also very worried about the use and misuse of said location data. In each case we were reassured about privacy and legality but even with the positive overtones of greater connectivity and information sharing, the implications of this for safety, security, and plain old private decency are still unnerving. However, the overall tone of the entire conference was notablz positive and exciting (as one would expect) and makes me look forward to the future.

It won't keep me up at night (not like writing his blog post is) but I think the speakers at The Next Web are correct that whether or not you call it Web 2.0, we're in the middle of truly interesting online evolution... and things are likely to get increasingly interesting as the months go by.

Many of the companies to which I was introduced thoroughly impressed me. I was certainly pleased and priveleged to meet everyone at the conference, particularly the social butterflies who stuck around for the after party and the variety fo after-after parties. Cheers!

Sorry for the long summary... don't forget to check out my photos from The Next Web on Flickr!