Along with roughly 1,400(!) other attendees, I’ve arrived in San Francisco to attend the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference that seems to have become the defining “event” of the year in this field. I suspect that 1,399 of the attendees have blogs of their own, and I’ve already seen several dozen people typing furiously on their laptops and mobile devices all through the Palace Hotel where the conference is being held. Along with individual bloggers, I’m sure the mainstream media will be here, too; indeed, one of the co-sponsors of the event is CMP Media, and another is Fast Company magazine. So all of the “boilerplate” information — who’s speaking, which vendors are floging their wares, what new product announcements are being made — will be thrashed and re-hashed ad nauseum elsewhere, and I’m not going to add more noise on the blogosphere by repeating all of that. I’ll limit my comments here to whatever strikes me as novel, bizarre, and noteworthy.

The overall structure of the conference is different than most I’ve attended over the past 30 years, and it seems to reflect a trend that’s been emerging during the past year or two: “un-conferences” or “bar camps,” which involve unstructured, free-for-all, give-and-take, Q-and-A sessions with a moderator or panel and a bunch of attendees. At this conference, the first four sessions consist of these “workshop” sessions, with the opening keynote presentations not even taking place until 4 PM this afternoon. I can imagine this being a good format when you’ve got an audience of a couple dozen lively attendees, with ideas and opinions and experiences they want to share with the “official” moderators. But this first session, where I’m currently sitting in an empty room typing these notes, looks like it’s set to accommodate an audience of about 300 people; that hardly strikes me as an environment for an informal give-and-take. We’ll have to see how it goes.

I’ve decided to attend the session on “Enterprise 2.0,” which is one of six sessions running in parallel. At 10:00, I’ll be attending a session titled “Europe Has Come of Age,” which will hopefully provide some updates on new Web 2.0 products and services in the European marketplace. And then, at 11:30, I’m planning to attend a session sponsored by IBM (8 other sessions are being “sponsored” – whatever that means — by vendors, which makes me just a wee bit suspicious). Obviously, there’s no way that one person can attend six parallel events, so if you really do want an overview of everything happening here, you’ll have to scan through several other blogs and reports.

So far, I’m the only audience member in the room, but it looks like all four panelists are here. I assume we’ll be starting up soon, and I’ll let you know how it goes…