Thinking Bigger: Web 2.0 Summit Gives a Purpose

For the first time in a while yesterday, I felt back at home.

Although I’ve been traveling all about speaking to different companies and business conferences, it’s been some time since I’ve gone to conferences in my core passion area of social media and web 2.0. Although I was only able to attend the third of three days, Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit really gave a good show in the most literal meaning. The 3k ticket price brought forth amazing speakers from Mark Zuckerberg, Arianna Huffington, Jerry Yang, Lance Armstrong, Issac Mao, Marc Benioff, Kevin Rose, and an inspirational keynote by Al Gore.

Unlike previous Web 2.0 events the theme was very clear to me, these social tools are now impacting so much more than the tech blogger circle jerk that we all tire of. With our future President launching a blog on Wednesday, Lance Armstrong discussing politics, ego and the web, and Al Gore on stage discussing how energy and global crises can help be solved from collaborative means.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a tech conference where we didn’t fondle the hammer and actually focused on building the house. Actually choosing an objective to apply these tools to much bigger problems: cancer, health, politics, global warming, energy crises, and connecting the world.

In an earlier panel we saw the bumping of elbows between Google, Microsoft, MySpace and Facebook each pitting themselves against each other in this cage match panel, yet it was more inspiring to hear in Al Gore’s closing keynote, he talked about having a purpose to using these tools to impact something far bigger than ever before.

See the many other public pictures tagged #web2summit coming in.