The mascots of the Web 2.0 Expo

By Josh Lowensohn – April 23, 2008 1:58 PM PDT

I'm always interested to see what a company chooses to represent the look and feel of its products. On a day-to-day basis, we bloggers rarely see anything besides the service and its WebEx presentation. However, when conference time comes, they pull out all the stops with crazy booths, over-the-top swag, booth babes--and in extreme cases: the mascot.

For most people, the last time they saw a mascot was at an organized sporting event. Today's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco might as well be the Super Bowl.

The two mascots seen below are for wildly different products. The one on the left is for eXpresso, an Excel spreadsheet sharing service that takes your Excel spreadsheets and gives them tags, online histories, and a really neat feature that lets you tweak which areas of a spreadsheet other users can make edits to.

The rabbit on the right is from MindTouch Deki Wiki, a hostable wiki service that lets you create all sorts of mashups to other Web services such as Google and Flickr.

The mascots of Web 2.0.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Sorely missing were any walking cell phones, despite the heavy presence of mobile-centric services. I was also hoping to see Coghead, (whose mascot is a walking gear) make the jump from vector art to velour sweat suit. Maybe next year.