Keynote speakers at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday delivered inspirational messages to keep innovators dreaming and working hard in the face of an economic slowdown. Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, said the Web 2.0 revolution is just getting started. He challenged attendees to work on big, world-changing problems, saying that the most successful companies in the technology industry have "big, hairy audacious goals."I attended the keynote along with at least four colleagues from InformationWeek. Our parent company, TechWeb, is co-sponsor of the conference along with O'Reilly Media. I knew my colleagues would be writing hard news articles from the keynote, so I felt free to take notes on whatever sounded interesting, ignore anything that failed to catch my ear, and take pictures with my iPhone. Also, O'Reilly talked to us last week and gave us a preview of much of his keynote; we wrote it up here, covering many of the main points that O'Reilly hit on Wednesday.

He said that the truly successful companies have "big, hairy, audacious goals." They set out to change the world -- and they succeed.

Consider, for example, these guys:

The text at the top says: "Would you have invested?" The answer: Of course not! Not if you had a lick of sense, they're just a bunch of '70s hippie nerds. The nerdiest one of all, on the bottom left, looks like he's 15 years old and going to take his cousin to the homecoming dance.

You would have been sure that company was a terrible investment. And you'd be wrong -- because that company is, of course, Microsoft, and the nerdy guy in the bottom left corner is now the richest man in the world.

Now, here's a picture of a guy whose company you want to invest in:

Note the broad, sober face, the jacket and tie, the balding pate, the very picture of the seasoned, responsible businessman. You'd give him a billion dollars if you had it.

And, again, you'd be wrong -- because that's Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., which innovated in the invention of the minicomputer (back when Olsen was himself a young nerd) but failed to keep up with the times when PCs and open systems swept the industry. After successive quarters of bad results and internal chaos, Digital got bought by Compaq, which had its own years of troubles until it got bought by Hewlett-Packard -- and HP didn't find Olsen's legacy easy to digest, either.

Similarly, everybody knew in 1998 that the Internet search industry was mature, and no one would want to invest in it, O'Reilly said. That was the year Google was founded.

O'Reilly concluded by reading aloud the entire text of the poem "The Man Watching," by Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem talks about how victory over small things makes us small, but to be defeated while doing something great will make us greater, like the Old Testament story of Jacob, who wrestles with an angel, inevitably losing, but becoming greater for the conflict.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

In other words: Dare to fail big.

O'Reilly said, "I want to leave you with the image of wrestling with the angel. Whether you win or lose, make a difference. Make a difference.

Also giving a keynote Wednesday was Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at the NYU Graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, and author of the new book, Here Comes Everybody, about how social media can help people organize spontaneously to make broad changes, often in opposition to big institutional forces like government and business.

Shirky's talk was peppered with outrageous analogies and connections, along the same general theme as O'Reilly's: Web 2.0 is changing the world, and the change is just beginning.

He started out by saying that the most notable invention of the early industrial revolution was gin. The industrial revolution caused societal upheavals, with vast populations moving from the farms to the big cities, and people had to get drunk and stay drunk to stand it all. It was only later, when the changes became more normal, that we saw the great institutional inventions of the industrial revolution, such as elected government.

Similarly, he said, the great invention of the post-World War II years in America was the invention of the sitcom. For the first time, people were working five days a week, and had a lot of free time, and didn't know what to do with it, so they parked themselves in front of the TV.

Sitcoms "served as a kind of cognitive heatsink that allowed society to dissipate pressure of all the free brain cells," he said.

Now, Web 2.0 is starting to put all those brain cells to work.

He told the story of an interview with a TV producer, and how he described Wikipedia to her. He'd been following the article on Pluto, which was recently demoted by astronomers from being considered a planet to a new category: dwarf planet. He described how the Wikipedia community eventually -- after much arguing and many false steps -- made the entry on Pluto reflect the current scientific reality.

The producer shook her head. "Where do people find the time?" she said.

Shirky responded, "Nobody who works in television gets to ask that question. It comes from the surplus of human thought that you people have been masking."

All the time spent on Wikipedia is a tiny franction of the time spent on TV. However wasteful some Web 2.0 activity, such as World of Warcraft, might be, at least people are now doing something, not watching Gilligan's Island, Shirky said.

"However wasteful it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, it's better than sitting in your basement trying to figure out who's cuter, Ginger or Mary Ann."

Internet users watch 1 trillion hours of television a year, Shirky said. All of Wikipedia requires 10,000 hours of work to complete. That means even a 1% reduction in the time people spend watching TV could lead to staggering changes.

Shirky said he was never able to convince the TV producer of the value of social media, because he didn't have the right anecdote. Now, he said, he does: A friend was watching television with his four-year-old daughter, and the little girl suddenly got up from the couch and started rummaging behind the TV, tugging on the wires. The friend asked her what she was doing, thinking she might be doing something cute, like looking for Dora. Instead, the girl said she was looking for the mouse.

"Here's what four-year-olds know -- a screen that ships without a mouse is broken," he said. "Media that's created for you that doesn't involve you is broken."

By the way, I've interviewed Shirky a couple of times over the phone and by e-mail, but never seen him before tonight. Here's something I noticed: Shirky and Hurley's imaginary friend on Lost are totally the same guy. See for yourself, compare Shirky's photo with this photo of Hurley's imaginary friend.