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I have to admit it, I get fan­tas­ti­cally excited by Web 2.0. As much as I love many of the com­pa­nies that have appeared on the back of the tech­nol­ogy, I love it for more nos­tal­gic rea­sons too.

I got into this busi­ness back in the day when the web was just com­ing on-stream, got my first inter­net account with Com­puserve, read my first issues of Wired and Mondo 2000, and believed this stuff was going to change the world.

Of course it has changed the world (almost uni­ver­sally for the bet­ter in my opin­ion) but it hasn’t been plain sail­ing. The hype behind the dot com boom even­tu­ally ended in a blaze of bank­rupt­cies and busi­ness went off a cliff. We entered dark, cau­tious times that, frankly, weren’t much fun for any­one involved.

Which brings me back to nos­tal­gia. Web 2.0 for me rep­re­sents a renewed opti­mism. We have new com­pa­nies being born every day (see TechCrunch US or UK for details). We also have some dying too (although gen­er­ally with less VC cash attached this time). And we poten­tially have a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of the rela­tion­ship between com­pa­nies and their customers.

But is it all just another bub­ble? Are we kid­ding our­selves into another over-optimistic ver­sion of the internet-as-nirvana argu­ment? And will this really spell the begin­ning of a Clue­train–inspired mar­ket­ing 2.0?

This is prob­a­bly the biggest con­ver­sa­tion we’re hav­ing at Ban­ner right now. Opin­ion ranges from the “this will change every­thing, start­ing now” end of the spec­trum to the “only blog­gers are influ­enced by blog­gers let’s get on with the real job” end. We don’t have all the answers, I’m not sure any­one has, but it’s a really impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion for any­one involved in tech­nol­ogy marketing.

To this end, we hav­ing a bit of a get-together we’re call­ing Inside the bub­ble on the evening of 9th Octo­ber. We’ve invited some friends, some clients and some smart peo­ple who have inter­est­ing per­spec­tives Web 2.0. We’ve also booked out the Ser­pen­tine Gallery Pavil­ion (the cos­mic egg as they’re call­ing it) just before it’s going to be closed and taken down. It should be pretty cool. It’s a panel dis­cus­sion style event so no Pow­er­Point or end­less speeches just the chance to ask peo­ple from the likes of TechCrunch UK, Google and etribes among oth­ers for their take on what Web 2.0 means for tech­nol­ogy marketing.

Any­way, we’d love to see you there so con­sider your­self invited (click here to find out more and to register).

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