There are very few people that give better interview than Federated Media’s John Battelle. I am seriously impressed with how he manages to moderate high level speaker after high level speaker without breaking a sweat. Especially since I usually run out of smart things to say 5 seconds into a conversation.

This will be Battelle’s 7th year at the helm of the venerated Web 2.0 Summit franchise and auspiciously I’ve heard a lot less lame “Why isn’t it Web 3.0?” jokes this year. Battelle attributes this to the phrase Web 2.0 finally sticking, “It’s always like, what’s next? …There was some serious pressure to iterarate.”

The theme this year is “Points of Control” and Battelle explained that he tried to select speakers based on whether they were incumbents or insurgents in the race to control mind and market share in the social and mobile web, “I’ve never had a theme that played out so much onstage.”

Interview highlights: Um, John Battelle, how giddy I get get when I say that Google is a node of control, what a mistake wearing two (!) different horizontal striped shirts was, the reverential discussion about Baidu’s Robin Li and Battelle’s subtle yet astute commentary on why Apple is the only major player missing onstage.

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Authors: Alexia Tsotsis

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