Christopher Alden presented Rojo, a new Web-based RSS aggregation service with social-software features built in, yesterday at Web 2.0. Alden, a former exec from Red Herring, gave a good presentation, and some of the Rojo features look cool — particularly, the ability to send specific RSS posts to contacts, so that you’re basically building a reading list for colleagues or friends.

But look at this photo — specifically, the fine print at the bottom:

Memo to presenters: don’t label the documents you’re presenting in public as “confidential”!

This is, of course, the exact label you see on presentations intended for potential investors, and no doubt it made its way onto a public screen by accident, when slides from just such a presentation got repurposed.

But still, the little slip was illustrative of the unusual dynamic here at Web 2.0: It’s definitely a wary mating dance between the tribes of the geeks and the suits, whose customs are not fully in sync.

What we’re seeing is that a lot of the ideas and technologies that have incubated over the last couple of years, and have been showcased at places like the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, are now on the radar of the venture-capital world. Ideas for new web companies built around RSS syndication and blogs, wikis and social software, innovative search technologies and mobile applications are hatching. And once more we’re witnessing the strange, messy process by which the enthusiasms and ideas of technologists are packaged, streamlined, prettified, sometimes improved and sometimes wrecked, as business people struggle to figure out how to make them work for the general public — and how to make money from them.

In terms of the evolution of the Web as a collective human endeavor, this conference’s name is a little off — I’d say we’re on Web 6.0 or 7.0 by now, at least. But in terms of the evolution of the Web as a place for people to try to invest, for a lot of the people here — “scarred veterans,” as William Janeway just described them, of the turn-of-the-millennium speculative frenzy — I guess it feels like only the second time around.

Andrew Conru is talking about the adult industry. He’s the CEO of Friendfinder. Stanford phd 1997. Cofounder of AdKnowledge in 1995. 180 employees. Started as a personals site. Huge traffic.

What really drives the adult business: scary, hardcore … mathematics. They know about short-term conversion ROI.
How can I get visitors cheaply? How can I convert visitors to paid members using any trick in the book? Separate companies: ones that get people to the front door, and other ones that do the conversion.

Tools for getting traffic: Affiliate marketing, popup ads, toolbars, spam and spyware, collaborative traffic networks.

Tools for conversion: subscription models, ID verification, traffic filtering, credit card processing and alternative payment systems, cookies and tracking, live streaming and audio.

What drove adult sites to be innovative? Hundreds of thousands — hyper competition among small operators. Traffic source owners determine what advertising is run, not the advertiser. CPA is the norm, not CPM.

Adult industry takes in $445 million last year online.

Trend: margins are getting tighter. Lots of free content. Hard for sites to differentiate.

I assume no one here goes to adult sites, you might not see these changes going on.

Shifting focus to longterm relationship with their visitors. Reduction of popups, adding registration and personalization. The pitch is becoming softer, less intrusive.

Lessons for the mainstream world? Adult webmasters often collaborate together — “co-opetition.” Mainstream sites are becoming more open to making money with adult content even as the adult industry is having a “self-regulated cleanup.”

Key takeaway: as people are optimizing every little bit of their web sites, you can over-optimize, hurt the user experience, reduce longterm ROI.

“I’m probably best known for being part of Web 1.0.”

“I’m going to argue that Universal Access to All Knowledge is possible.”

Altavista said, let’s just index the whole web. Jeff Bezos said, let’s just sell all books. People who focus on doing it all are being pretty successful in the business world.

Texts: how much is there? Library of Congress = 26 terabytes. $60,000 of storage. Price of a house — or, around here, a garage. Costs about $10 a book to scan a book. $260 million. [I’ll need to doublecheck these numbers!]

Question of copyright. What do we do with the out of print but still under copyright stuff? the orphans? — most of the 20th century. 8 million books. We’re not allowed to digitize them. We filed a lawsuit. Kahle v. Ashcroft — to try to allow us to bring out of print but under copyright works onto the night. To do this in the not-for-profit sphere.

It turns out you can print and bind a book for a buck. That’s cheap — cheaper than a library, Harvard says it costs them $2 to lend a book. Bookmobile project. The idea of going book to book — book, scan it, put it on the net, download it, print it, bind it: book to book.

Let’s go to audio. 2-3 million disks that have ever been sold. It’s a very litigated area. Lots of people aren’t served terribly well by the publishing industry. Bands that want to circulate their concert recordings: Grateful Dead. Community-based thing. Folk music, “fringe” areas. Non profit record labels. To people publishing under Creative Commons licenses, we are offering unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free. If you want to give stuff away, there’s institutional support to help make it happen.

Moving images. Isn’t that too big to do the whole darn thing? Most people think of Hollywood films. 100-200,000 theatrical releases. 1/2 estimated to be Indian. It’s a few more bookshelves, but it’s doable. Copyright issues. Educational films. Mostly being used by others to build new films. Genre of Lego movies.

Television. Recording 20 channels of TV 24 hours a day. Around a petabyte of this stuff. Making it available is still problematic.

Software: copyright office allowing them to archive it.

The Web archive. [He’s showing the original Yahoo home page.’] Kind of looks like Google today. Pets.com.

Preservation and access: the idea is to not have one copy on top of the san andreas faultline. Copies in Alexandria and Amsterdam.

Will we do it? Lots of business opportunities, already spun off four little companies. This is interesting, it requires govt, non-profits and for-profits to work together. Make something we’re really proud of to pass on to the next generation.

Live at Web 2.0 today. Joe Kraus, Excite founder, is debuting “Jotspot.”

First trend: “Wikis are growing like weeds.” They centralize information that had been scattered across companies and “allow people to loosely join small pieces of information together.” He’s quoting David Weinberger’s “small pieces loosely joined” (without crediting David.)

Second trend: customization of software. Software’s way too brittle, it doesn’t work the way you work, it works the way the software wants you to work. Excel was revolutionary. Bring similar concepts of customizability ,flexibility, to Lightweight web applications.

On the surface, it looks like a wiki, you can use it that way, but at its heart, it’s a service you can use to loosely join information together.

Integrating email — each page is addressable by email. Adding structure incrememtally to pages. Turning pages into forms. Some spreadsheet-style features. Pulling in Yahoo news search results and google search results. You can add structure and then alter it as you go.

It’s a dozen-person company. He’s going pretty fast in the demo, but it looks pretty cool.