The O’Reilly Conference team and our partners over at CMP are delighted to announce a brand new bundle of conference joy: the first Web 2.0 Expo! Our newest addition to the conference family measures four days in length, weighs in at six parallel sessions and workshop tracks, and sports a full head of expo hall hair.

Enough is enough, I know! Read more about it over on the O’Reilly Radar and here’s the official press release.

Jonathan Webber mentions one of last year’s Web 2.0 Conference panels led by Safa Rashtchy in an article on how media is changing:

It’s common these days to hear businessmen talk about their children’s habits; a focus group of one, or two, or three may not be very scientific but, hey, it’s better than total ignorance. At the Web 2.0 conference last year there was actually a panel of teenagers, moderated by a Wall Street analyst, talking about the merits of MySpace versus Facebook and the like.

Program chair Rael Dornfest was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful quotation, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as the theme for ETech 2007.

Are you making complex things simple or makes the impossible possible? Cleverly routing around a problem, subtly integrating technologies, or streamlining user interfaces? If the technology you’re working on–be it bionics, swarming, nanotechnology, energy, gaming, accessiblity–could be mistaken for magic, we want to hear from you.

Proposal deadline: October 9!

“Next generation concepts in open-source technologies usher in a whole new style of journalism,” writes Dan Crawford.

Still lots of news coverage to be posted from OSCON, and I’ll try to make a little more headway today. First up: Adam Doxtater over at MadPenguin just sent me info on an interview he and fellow MPer Narayan Newton conducted while at OSCON:

After the announcement of the new Google Code service at OSCON 2006 in Portland Oregon, we had the distinct pleasure of sitting down and talking with Google’s Open Source Program Manager, Chris DiBona and their Lead Open Source Engineer, Greg Stein in a little more detail.

Fellow Portland Perl hacker Chris Dawson has just uploaded the OSCON Roundup podcast to the PDX.pm podcasts archive. On Wednesday night, 09 August, the Portland Perl Mongers shared their new knowledge and experiences attending, volunteering, and organizing OSCON 2006. There are several good nuggets of information there.

Over on his Between the Lines blog, Phil Windley mentions something he observed at last March’s ETech:

This discussion is related to the whole attention and intension discussion that happened at ETech last spring. How much control should you have over the data companies collect about you? After ETech, I concluded that most people want a lot of control over that data and that achieving that end will be much harder than we think-technically, legally, economically, and politically.

ETech 2007 teaser: we’re putting the final touches on the Call for Participation now and will release all the details next week.

Editor Cal Evans sent me a nice note: “Again, had a ball, looking forward to next year.” Likewise, Cal! He’s posted some final thoughts about his OSCON experience:

The goddess’ of the O’Reilly Conference Team have yelled “cut” the set is struck and everybody has gone home. Speakers are busily reviewing the evaluation forms and tuning their presentations for the next round and the attendees are sorting through the T-Shirts. (Keepers or dust-rags) Let’s glance over our shoulder at what was OSCON06.

If you missed ‘em, you can read all of Cal’s OSCON postings in one place, and take a gander at his Flickr group.

Last year’s EuroOSCON featured an evening Make Fest that was such a hit, we’ll be doing it again this year! Phil Torrone has put out a call for makers:

We’re hosting a European Maker Faire the evening of Wednesday, September 20 in Brussels, Belgium. This event is free and open to anyone possessing the Maker spirit. All Makers are welcome! The hours are 1930 to 2130, and the location is the Hotel Le Plaza, Brussels, Belgium. The Maker Faire event is being held in conjunction with O’Reilly’s EuroOSCON Open Source Convention (for more details about EuroOSCON, please visit here).

What really makes a Maker Faire work is the grassroots participation from Makers such as you. If you have an interesting MAKE-like project that you are bursting to share with your fellow Makers, we are actively seeking Makers who would like to exhibit at the Faire. Interested in sharing a project? Please write to euromaker@makezine.com and tell us about yourself and your project.

One last reminder: Monday is the early registration discount deadline for EuroOSCON, so sign up and save some Euros.

On the final day of OSCON, the good people over at HP announced the winners of the photo contest they sponsored. Official conference photographer and judging panel member James Duncan Davidson reported that it was difficult to choose, but in the end, grand prizes went to Steve Elgersma and Ted Leung; runners up were Premshree Pillai and Dustin Tinney.

Over on the Radar, EuroOSCON co-chair Nikolaj Nyholm writes:

I’m an avid fan of British collective MySociety’s slew of succesful civic and community websites which include HearFromYourMP, WriteToThem, and most notably TheyWorkForYou. TheyWorkForYou is a site which indexes the raw transcripts from the House of Lords and House of Commons according to speaker and debate topic…With a bit of luck MySociety will be at EuroOSCON in Brussels next month…

As Nikolaj also notes in his post, this Monday is the early registration discount deadline, so sign up and save some Euros.

We received some excellent OSCON coverage in the local media, including this piece by Mike Rogoway on Eben Moglen’s inspiring keynote that ended the convention on a very high note:

A weeklong conference of open source developers ended Friday in Portland with a battle cry. Eben Moglen, legal counsel to Free Software Foundation, declared that the war against closed, proprietary software controlled by Microsoft and others is far from won. “Do not think for an instant that the powers of the 20th century have faded away,” the Columbia University law professor warned hundreds of software developers at the closing address of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention at the Oregon Convention Center.

“Robert Kaye blogged the same OSCON session I wrote about on Friday, What Happens When the Money Comes,” writes Tim O’Reilly, “and captured a few good anecdotes that I left out of my account…However, I wanted to expand on Robert’s retelling of my story about a signature open source moment I experienced at an X Consortium meeting sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.”

Matt Asay boils down his OSCON 2006 presentation:

Earlier this week I delivered a presentation at OSCON 2006 entitled “Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses.” I’ve been involved with commercial open source since 1998, and have learned a lot over the years (including how to fail spectacularly and slightly more gracefully). I’m in the middle of a string of successes, though, and figured now was the time to pretend to know-it-all. You can view my OSCON 2006 presentation here. It was an extension of some JBoss analysis I did recently, as well as an attempt to pass on some of the lessons I’ve learned so that the next round of open source commercialization will avoid my mistakes.