The Valley Goes To The Mountains, In Full Blogging Mode

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“Tech is back at Davos this year,” one of the participants exclaimed to me before I left Silicon Valley for the annual conference at this ski resort town.

It doesn’t feel that way. Silicon Valley’s participation at Davos peaked just before the dot-com bubble burst, and it has never really recovered. The high point was probably the year that Sun Microsystems took over a small villa across the street from the Congress Center — probably in 2001. (After the crash, Microsoft inherited the choice location.)

This year, much of the focus appears to be on tech-centric philanthropy, such as the Gates Foundation and the newly arrived Google.org. Microsoft itself plans to join Dell and Bono’s Product RED in a press announcement later this week.

In 2007, tech’s presence seemed to center around the Web 2.0 world and the arrival of the bloggers, who were permitted to attend and cover the conference for the first time.

In 2008, there is no shortage of uber-bloggers in attendance. Tim O’Reilly, who helped launch the commercial Web and later open-source software in the mid-1990s, will be here.

Michael Arrington, the Tech Crunch impresario, already proclaimed in print that his goal for the week is to persuade the Google boys to let him fly home on their jet. I can just imagine the likelihood of that happening.

In the registration tent on Tuesday afternoon, Loic Le Meur, the French videoblogger, could be seen wandering around filming himself with a digital video camera while intoning, “This is the registration tent…” Not long afterwards, he had posted a video interview of fellow blogger Robert Scoble, who seemed quite enthused that he had been invited this year and was ready to talk about the deeper meaning of social software.

We’ve seen the future, and it is obviously Max Headroom (the 1980s science fiction television series about a proto-video blogger).

– John Markoff

I actually showed Loic Le Meur a house here in SF that was not on the market. Too bad it didn’t suit him. Really cool guy.

†Posted by alex

Re: “In 2007, tech’s presence seemed to center around the Web 2.0 world and the arrival of the bloggers, who were permitted to attend and cover the conference for the first time.”

I blogged Davos in 2000. I certainly was permitted to attend (I was invited, had a white badge, etc).

I wouldn’t claim to have been the first to blog Davos, but it’s definitely not true that 2007 was the first year it was blogged.

†Posted by Dave Winer

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