Well, I'd say that it's finally honesty in advertising. Half the Web 2.0 stuff is marketing/advertising/advertorial or whatever under the guise of technology. Before we had all the Web 2.0 stuff, a typical business plan would be "we're going to build the best [database/word processor/'foo' server etc.] in the world and we're going to sell it to people". If the TechCrunch crowd were doing that, MC Hammer would be totally irrelevant. But they're not.
When we're talking about YouTube - the technological component of which consists in FLV files and a server farm the size of a small town - it seems far more appropriate to have media people than tech people. I mean, what the crap do we know about advertising and music promotion or indie video? We write code and geek out with computers. A group of fourteen year-olds could club together and build their own YouTube clone in less than a month these days (and evidence suggests quite a number of them have - and then subsequently went on to found companies).
In an age of tech startups being basically media companies in disguise, MC Hammer is a far more appropriate choice for the conference board than a techie.
