I’m in Amsterdam, de-jet-lagging in preparation for a Web 2.0 conference tomorrow. It looks like a timely and relevant conference, and the participants are coming from 14 countries. The agenda looks interesting, and I’m hoping to get a better sense of how the European marketplace is reacting to Web 2.0 technologies, cultural trends, and business models.

From the early 70s to the late 1990s, I traveled to Europe five or six times a year; on my first visit to Amsterdam in 1971, it was a bit of a shock to find myself in a tiny little hotel with no soap, no shampoo, and no washcloth. I got used to all of that pretty quickly, but I still have bad memories of the problems connecting to the Internet all through the 1990s. Germany was by far the worst, with telephone lines that disappeared into a bullet-proof metal plate in the wall, preventing any kind of modem connection. Things gradually improved, but it was always a bit of an ordeal to figure out what local access number would connect me to an Internet service provider with reasonable rates.

Interestingly, I’ve only made two or three trips to Europe throughout the 2000-2005 time period, and those were to Rome — where 56K dialup lines were the best one could hope for. But today, I’m sitting in a comfortable Amsterdam hotel room (which, by the way, does have soap and shampoo and wash-cloths), and I’m connected to the Internet via a convenient Wi-Fi network. It’s expensive (22 Euros per day), but when I discovered that it was blocking my outbound email messages, I was able to make a quick call to a technical support center in France, where I got friendly, polite instructions in perfect English. Quelle surprise!

The Wi-Fi network is supposed to work throughout the hotel, so I should be able to post some blog entries during the conference tomorrow … stay tuned.