For those of you living outside of the Emerald Isle, Enterprise Ireland is one of the reasons why Ireland is the biggest exporter of software in the world. OK , you can argue with that last statistic , but when these guys organise a Web 2 conference , you can be sure that the mainstream is beginning to recognise Web 2.0 as going to be big , very big.

Having said that , my view is Web 2.0 is almost , but not quite , going mainstream (in Ireland at least). Judging by the people I met and the dress standards I would judge the audience as 1/3rd Business-VC (suit and tie) 1/3rd Techie (Jeans and T-Shirt) and 1/3rd Professional Technologist (Suit but no tie). This contrasts with the last Web 2.0 event , where the audience was almost exclusively techie, despite dual business and technology marketing.
(Photo of Marc Canter Speaking , by Dermod).

You can judge for yourself from the agenda at the Web2Ireland site, and see if Enterprise Ireland got the balance of speakers right. Aside from Marc Canter (who managed to successfuly quote Joyce in a techie presentation!) the main speakers - Judy Gibbons from Accel and Jeff Clavier (Software Only) - were either VC or Angel investors. That’s not to say that they didn’t have a lot of good, interesting and relevant things to say, it just meant that you had to bear in mind their angle on things (we want to lend you money). Given the success of all the people speaking, I think they are well worth listening to. Adam Green , who despite being on a blogging break, hosted a very good lunchtime session (summary: ‘everything is XML’).

Want to know more about the Web 2 Ireland event? - further information here.