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Web 2.0 Expo To Highlight 'Unconference' Program

Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin, Jonathan Schwartz, Yahoo's CTO, the chief architect for Al Gore's Current TV, and The Fake Steve Jobs will be there. What about you?

The Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next week will be notable for many things. None withstanding a stellar lineup of speakers, including those mentioned above.

Now, in addition to nonstop talk about mashups and startups mixed in with handshaking and backslapping, there will be a multitrack conference, an "unconference" program called Web2Open. You might think of it as a forum for creativity, engineering, and innovation. I like to think of it like a hometown restaurant: come for the food, but stay for the pie.

You can read more about the agenda on the Web site.

Among the meat-and-potatoes conference tracks scheduled are these:

• Marketing & Community
• Design & User Experience
• Strategy & Business Models
• Fundamentals; Development
• Focus on Web Operations
• Focus on Mobile Web
• Focus on Social Platforms

Other speakers we're looking forward to seeing include Charlene Li, the Forrester Research analyst and a driving force behind Forrester's social computing and Web 2.0 research. She likes to pick apart how companies can use technologies like blogs, social networking, RSS, tagging, and widgets for marketing purposes.

Another is Mitchell Baker, former chief wrangler and chairman for the Mozilla Foundation. Anyone who can explain Firefox to Charlie Rose and come away not pulling out their hair is all right in my Web 2.0 book.

Jonathan Zittrain will be speaking. He's the chairman for Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, director and founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the author of The Future Of The Internet -- And How to Stop It, a must read.

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, previously working at Apple, Go Corp., and Intuit before joining Netscape Communications in 1996. Aoki is a strong believer in the ability of technology to bring people closer together and to make our lives easier.

And finally, Matt Cutts, a Google-head who heads up the Web spam team. Cutts wrote SafeSearch, which is Google's family filter, previously holding top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense. Ironically, the DOD's secret motto is also "Don't Be Evil."

Oh, and by the way ... I'll be there in person. Feel free to say hello if you spot me in the halls.

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