Web2Expo San Francisco is coming up. The conference has grown quickly; initially, as a reaction to the popularity of O’Reilly’s more blue-sky conference, Web2.0 (which is now called Web2Summit.) Following the success of Web2Summit — the organizers sold out their 2,000 registrations quickly and had to turn away thousands more — they launched the Expo.

Web2Expo isn’t just a spill-over conference; it’s now got an identity of its own. If the folks at Web2Summit speculate and scheme, then it’s left to the Web2Expo attendees to figure out how to build what their less grounded peers have already promised.

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The HP booth was packed with cool machines and beautiful displays. You might think they’re into lots of industries. But everything about its “digital life” program is focused on getting people to touch their personal content.

This seemed like a recurring theme this year. Most of the companies had sentences like “your content, anytime, anywhere.” Their slogans were idyllic, speculative, wonderful, blue-sky narratives that reflected how consumers are using their electronic devices for a better tomorrow.

On the way here, I fired up my little HP printer. It was low on ink, so it offered to print me a page saying which cartridges I needed.

Let me repeat that: It offered to use more ink because it was out of ink.

That’s so brazen, it’s unbelievable. But it’s damned focused.

I’m at CES this week, my first time ever. Wrote a couple of pieces for GigaOm and Earth2Tech yesterday. Definitely a target-rich environment. It’s packed and chaotic, of course. But there’s humor and irony in the crowds if you knew where to look. Here’s a quick recap of some of the things I’ve seen so far.

People taking pictures of Sony’s 27″ OLED TV

Sure, the thing is amazing. It made me feel like I was seeing something for real, but through the eyes of a child who’d just opened them, bright and astonished. I turned around and the other televisions and monitors looked pale and miserable. But really, if you’re going to take a picture of the picture and look at it on a TV that isn’t an OLED… why bother?

Showing off Formula One racecars at a green tradeshow

CES announced that it was going to be carbon-neutral. I’m not sure they bought the carbon offsets for the huge clouds of black smoke spewing from the engines of BMW’s exhibit, where drivers revved their engines and burned their tires.

People taking pictures of Phillips’ 3D TV

Same problem, different TV. Sure, those dice came rolling right out at you from the screen. But they’re not going to roll out of your camera unless it has the WOWvx wizardry the Dutch company plans to bring to market in two years’ time.

Pricegrabber.com, with a booth at CES

This is a huge building filled with two kinds of people: Those who make their money building electronics, and those who make their money selling electronics. It’s not clear why either of them would want to talk to you about how you could help customers compare prices and squeeze their margins.

Microsoft’s foray into children’s books

The brilliant “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?” children’s book that Redmond was giving out had gems like, “Offices are why people get grumpy and say bad words,” and “you can even share files with your uncle who smells like bark.” Not sure the MS Office group liked that first line. The book is hilarious. Gates’ swansong video was great, too.

Then again, maybe it isn’t. The fine print in the foreleaf says,

Use of Windows Home Server’s remote access features may require additional services from your broadband provider, such as access to certain “ports” that some providers may block for some customers on some service plans.

If you can get past the fact that the sentence belongs in the gallery of misused quotation marks, it’s frightening to see a concrete example of the erosion of net neutrality. And it’s scary that when you do a Google search for Net Neutrality, all the unpaid links want it, and the one paid ad is from a telecom lobby group. Sort of makes it clear who wins on each side of the argument, no?