Maybe it’s time for Tim O’Reilly to kill his Web 2.0 Conference, or at least, to rename it, based on a recent post in TechCrunch titled The Death Of “Web 2.0″.  According to Robin Wauters ….

“… the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly…”

Definitely time for a name change – but maybe the traffic decrease on “Web 2.0″ is caused by “economic distress” – there’s so many layoffs in the Tech Industry now – people are more drawn to substance over hype at this time, and a lot of Web 2.0, was, in fact, hype.   I used Google Trends to try to prove the correlation between a lack of jobs and a lack of enthusiasm for Web 2.0

The chart speaks for itself – it  isn’t 100% a match – but still – to me, the organizers of conferences, like Web 2.0 Expo need to start changing the focus away from hype and into reality.

But, if  “Web 2.0″ is getting less traffic where does the traffic come to from that term?  Google drives a lot of it, which points to WikiPedia, and that’s supported by Compete.com

Volume Rank	Destination Website	% Total Keyword Volume	% of Site’s Search Traffic	Average Monthly Search Referrals
1	wikipedia.org	42.09%	0.01%	539,333,670
2	go2web20.net	8.02%	9.21%	58,014
3	youtube.com	4.08%	0.00%	277,388,537
4	web20workgroup.com	3.61%	100.00%	2,231
5	oreilly.com	3.60%	0.33%	763,247
6	oreillynet.com	3.57%	0.71%	338,316
7	paulgraham.com	3.52%	3.71%	68,978
8	digital-web.com	2.86%	2.99%	69,949
9	techsoup.org	2.14%	1.10%	134,408
10	web2expo.com	2.06%	4.07%	34,259
11	facebook.com	1.69%	0.00%	250,103,363

Just another thought on this quiet, Saturday afternoon.