I spent quite some hours with Tim O’Reilly last Thursday in Bilbao and Vitoria, where he came to give a conference about Web 2.0. He has one of the clearest minds I have ever seen, together with Alvy from Microsiervos.

He is also down to Earth: supports free software but accepts closed software’s (and copyleft’s) role. And he is not just the typical geek who can only talk about computers. From the very first moment he met us, he started to ask all sort of (difficult) questions about the Basque political situation.

The conference was great and he also offered some good news titles. As when he said that “blogs’ role has been exaggerated” or that we are entering a new financial “bubble”. But the Web 2.0 concepts are here to stay: transparency, openness…

Behind the technology (he mentioned especially Ajax and Google Maps mashups), you can find many interesting things that people are doing in collaboration. “The way the World works is also changing”, he said, as the WWW is becoming a platform where people can do all type of things. And networking is helping us to do things which looked impossible some years ago. As of the long tie, he said that the big business is in the dog (not in its tie), the aggregators, as YouTube, Google or MySpace.