Minimalist, Zen, giving back, creative leadership, setting it free, create more value than you capture; do these sound like tags from one of the cutting edge Web 2.0 conferences in the world today? Probably not, however, at Web 2.0 Expo this year, the theme is indicative of the state of our times, and it’s more than that. It’s a different way of remaining cutting edge while leading creatively and with new perspective.

It all started on Day 1 of Web2Expo when I participated in a session delivered by Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts on SEO: “Complexities can kill the crawl” refers to the truths of search engine optimization techniques: short URLs win when it comes to search engine rankings. (Look out Facebook-y strings.)

Then, I participated in Nancy Duarte’s “Tools for Visual Storytelling” and the lasting impression was one of Martha Graham and her Lamentation: a piece and images used to demonstrate achieving the Zen we strive for in our visual storytelling. We need to express our own human qualities “because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”

Further down the hall I strolled into a session around Social Media Maps by Real Branding’s Mark Silva, and I learned that ‘Relevance [in social networks] is: Are you there when someone needs it?’ This doesn’t leave much room for the imagination – your network’s nodes are attenuated only as far as you are relevant: seems clear and precise, no wiggle room there.

On Day 2, the theme was impermeable; some of the bells and whistles in measuring and monitoring your social media strategy can be replaced by “three simple questions,” according to Jeremiah Owyang:

Where have we been?

Where are we now?

Where are we going?

Isn’t it all very primitive (in a good sense) and human-sounding?  How often should we tweet? Sarah Milstein answers “22 times a day is insane 4.5 is average - rule of thumb – just once a day.” Maggie Fox said that Ford has “set its content free” with a Social Media Strategy to “make it easy” and “let it go.” 

One keynote speaker, John Maeda, the President of RISD – who has more capacity for new ideas than arguably anyone in the conference keynote hall – shared his “think like an artist or designer” approach to Creative Leadership.  At Web 2.0 Expo, as I saw The Power of Less in action, it’s exciting to imagine what’s next. Or to use conference organizer Tim O’Reilly’s interpretation, don’t think of what’s next as Web 3.0 but: “It’s Web-Squared, it’s World-Shaping.”