Well, I spent most of last week getting to, attending, and coming home from Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. It’s where we geeks congregate and decide what the next idea in tech is.

Not really. It’s your average trade show, just with more laptops and tattoos.

What I wanted to mention is how this conference solidified my idea about the current trend in online stuff: more info, playing with each other.

Yes, your website has some data. Maybe you’ve even gone through the trouble of tagging it so that you know what’s a date and what’s a location and what’s a description and what’s an image. So now what? Should your data be locked up on your site? Should you force your users to visit your site to get your content (when you use the word “force” it’s hard to say yes to that, isn’t it)?

We live in a Mashable age. We can take content from Site A and some maps from Site B and mash together a whole new web site. If we’re feeling clever, we can take that new site, turn it into a widget and spread it out to other sites. At some point, your website might just be the place where you store your data, but all your users never show up to your site.

This has already been happening with RSS. I couldn’t tell you what some of my favorite web sites look like simply because I just subscribe to the content via RSS and never visit their site. RSS makes it so easy for me to read more, so why should I waste time jumping from site to site. Site owners, while they can’t really count the users who show up to their site anymore, can see more awareness or their site as their content starts to spread.

If you’re brave, go take a look at Mashable. It’s the one stop shopping for what everyone’s doing with this mashable kind of content. It may look like a lot at first (actually, because it is a lot — they post a dozen new entries a day at least), but if you look around (or subscribe like I do), you will soon find interesting tools that catch your eye.

I’m off on a work-related trip for the next week, so I might not post, but when I get back, I’ll show you the website I used to record the entire trip!