“This coming week is arguably the most important gathering of the people actually driving the web,” opines the eightblack site.

“The US-based Web 2.0 Summit is always a sellout,” it explains. “And by invitation only. No one is quite sure how invitations are handed out but safe to say that the speaker line-up in itself is well worth the admission price of $3,500.”

A weakness for hyperbole is not an unknown quality among web evangelists.

But eightblack has a point: the attendee list for this week's Web 2.0 Summit, which begins in San Francisco on Wednesday, features the brains behind some of the highest-profile sites and services on the web.

Jay Adelson, the Digg chief, Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, Chris DeWolfe, the MySpace co-founder, Marissa Mayer, head of search at Google, Meg Whitman, the eBay boss, and Mark Zuckerberg, the brains behind Facebook, will all be there.

It’s not just an event for new-media moguls – a few of the old-school type will also attend. Randall Stephenson, the chief executive of AT&T, Philippe Dauman, of Viacom (who perhaps should not be seated too close to Ms Meyer, given Viacom's ongoing legal wrangling with Google over YouTube piracy) and Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, to name just three.

With just a couple of days to go until the web’s great and good descend on the US West Coast (the ones that don’t already live there, that is) for the event, speculation is mounting about who and what will make headlines.

MySpace following FaceBook’s example and opening itself up as a platform to providers of third-party applications – widgets that will sit on the site and may be used to distribute goods or services – is seen as likely.

Nokia, the biggest maker of mobile phones, is also expected to make a "major product announcement" – possibly, the rumour mill suggests, a new internet-enabled smartphone to rival Apple's iPhone.

Then there is the conference organisers' take on what to expect. "Through incisive plenary sessions, cut-through-the-hype onstage conversations, rapid-fire "high order bits" and "show me" presentations and in-depth workshops, visionaries and executives from internet businesses will present their unique perspective on the web's future-influx," they say.

Just don’t expect everybody to be enthusiastic.

“Billed as a big-think brainstorming session, Web 2.0 is actually a three-day business-development party with a $3,000 entry fee,” snipes Valleywag.com.

"Attendees are there to find sales and partnering leads, and to boost publicity for their companies and products.”

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