Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco has opened registration, and we’re offering you, our blog readers, a 25% discount if you use discount code websf10bl25 to register. Alternatively, you can get a free Expo Hall Only pass when you use discount code websf10snex.

Speaker List

This year’s speaker list (far from complete) includes

• Baratunde Thurston
• Paul Buchheit
• Eric Ries
• Clara Shih
• Ben Huh
• Steve Blank

If you want a great preview of what you might see, here’s a video of Baratunde Thurston at Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009:

Conference Tracks

The conference agenda includes four main Conference tracks:

• Strategy & Business Models
• Social Media Marketing
• Design & User Experience
• Development

Our six Focus Tracks include Mobile, Community, Real-time, Analytics, Enterprise, and Cloud Computing.

This Year’s Theme: The Power of Platforms

Ten years ago, companies like AOL, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Earthlink, and eBay battled to define the ways we would use the Web. The winners drew millions of customers, but more importantly, they spawned ecosystems that created huge opportunities for partners, vendors and competitors. Today, new wars with new players like Facebook, Twitter, and Bing are emerging on the Web—wars that create hard questions for businesses that must decide their own roles in our increasingly mobile, social, and real-time world. Web 2.0 Expo highlights the important debates, handicaps the key players, and helps you pick the winning platforms for growth in a web-fueled world.

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If you have any questions about this year’s content, be sure to leave them in the comments!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager for Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Are hyper-local online communities the wave of the future? Many location-based apps (think Foursquare or Gowalla or Yelp) have caught on quickly, and Facebook and Twitter will likely add the option to make updates location-aware.  In response, some in the Web 2.0 world are shifting away from making products that create national or international communities. Instead, they’re looking at the local level and hope to conquer the world city by city, even neighborhood by neighborhood.

These relative newcomers were likely inspired by pioneering, local online community makers such as Topix. Founded in 2002, Topix is – as their About Us page says – “the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city.” It aggregates news from thousands of sources across the web and delivers content based on your chosen zip code (there’s an international audience as well of course).

But beyond posting news stories, Topix encourages its users to comment and report on stories going on in their own neighborhood. Due to this focus on community, Topix receives over 30,000 comments a day, most of which are focused on the local level.

Topix CEO Chris Tolles was gracious enough to answer a few of our questions about local online communities, user generated content, and the future of the newspaper industry (including what he thinks of Rupert Murdoch’s threat to pull News Corp. content off of Google News). Chris will also be speaking at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this May, so be sure to register later this week!

Without further ado, another Web 2.0 Expo Speaker Interview:

Kaitlin: In a recent Topix blog post, you noted that “Topix has gone from being merely an aggregator of local news, to becoming the home of local voice on the web”. You base this on the fact that 60% of articles on Topix are original, user generated news stories, and 75% of pageviews on Topix are on the commentary.

First of all, how did you get there? What specifically makes Topix different from any other site that can throw up a comment board and host “a community”?

Chris: It’s that we have created this commentary around locality. We have 30,000 forums around specific US cities and towns. Also, we have reached critical mass with over 90,000,000 comments across millions of different threads. We created this initially as an adjunct to the news we aggregated. Now, it has really turned into the main focus of the site, especially in areas with poor news coverage.

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EDIT: We have now closed registration for our webcast. Thank you for your interest!

“My nightmare is someone would ask me a question, and I wouldn’t see it.”

Jenny Cisney spends hours searching online for what people are saying about Kodak – “looking for trouble” as she calls it. As their Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager, she’s a first responder to questions or comments on Twitter about Kodak, and she blogs about such things as Kodak giveaways, Kodak Picture of the Day winners, and as was the case for the recent 2010 International CES, Kodak booth news and updates during conferences and events.

“I would tweet something like ‘first person to take a photo of yourself in the booth and send it to me on Twitter wins a digital camera,’” Cisney said about one of her many giveaway promotions at CES that generated significant buzz—and booth traffic—for Kodak.

Cisney is one of the growing number of social media managers companies hire to proactively engage customers online and to help drive interest at shows and conferences. Although social media marketing is growing, most event exhibitors have yet to fully explore tools like Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, or blogs.

To help bridge the gap, we at Web 2.0 Expo are hosting a free webcast, “Effective Social Media for Event Exhibitors,” on Tuesday, February 23 at 10 a.m. PST. Led by Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair and “The Twitter Book” co-author Sarah Milstein and myself (Kaitlin Pike), the one-hour session will feature real-life success stories and practical tips for using services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your own company blog for efficient marketing before, during, and after a show. We’ll follow the presentation with a meaty Q&A, so bring your questions.

Register for this webcast below by filling out the Google form we’ve created. We’ll email you the necessary information to sign in and join us. Space is limited, so please sign up now if you are interested.

During the webcast, we’ll discuss how Cisney and other exhibitors use social media to drive booth traffic and generate leads during events.  Specific topics we’ll cover include

• Tools and websites to use
• Measuring success with social media
• Pre- and post-show strategy
• Demographics of different social networks
• Tested and proven giveaway contests
• Organizing Booth Tweet Ups
• Upcoming trends

One strategy in particular we’ll discuss is how to start talking about your booth activities well in advance of the show. Even if you’re planning to do a lot of blogging or tweeting from the show, you’ll get better booth traffic if attendees learn ahead of time about interesting things you’re doing and can plan to visit you. “Not everyone is walking around the show checking Twitter,” Cisney notes.

If you have any questions about the webcast, please leave them in the comments or talk to us @w2e.

We look forward to talking with you in February!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e.

Sarah Milstein is the Co-Chair of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @SarahM.