I'm in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Summit, a technology conference put on by O'Reilly Media and CMP.
The speaker list is certainly substantial - Rupert Murdoch, Steve Ballmer, Meg Whitman, Mike Moritz and Mark Zuckerberg among others - but there's a sense that this event isn't really much about Web 2.0, but just the dotcom business world (the startup focused parts have now split off into another event, the Web 2.0 Expo).
There is due to be a slew of announcements made to time with the event - this one from MySpace and Skype looks like the first - but most of them aren't likely to be worth bothering with. It'll be fun to see who comes up with the best (read: most ludicrous) piece of marketing guff (I imagine Valleywag will be on the trail, too.
Anyway, apropos of the recent discussion between Paul Graham and Ryan Carson about startups outside Silicon Valley, it's worth remembering how much gravity this part of California has in terms of technology and startups.
It's easy for us to talk up the dotcom scenes in London and around Europe - and they are starting to blossom - but there's a massive difference between being part of a small group of like-minded people and being part of what's normal. For example, fuelled by coffee last night I popped into a party organised by Reddit to celebrate one year of being part of the Wired family. The small venue was packed, with faces new and old. The big difference was that nobody thought it was too weird... you don't get that back home very often.
