Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010′s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity.

There’s no way you could have been in the aisle between the Dr. Bott’s booths anytime Thursday and believed this expo was less than any other. I haven’t been at every Macworld, but I’ve been at the last five in a row now. The previous four included Apple and this one didn’t. I didn’t miss the fruit company wizards. Last year Apple’s big news was what, iWork? We didn’t have people seven-deep, drooling over a phone which wouldn’t be on sale for nearly six months. That was a dramatic moment in 2007, like lining up at 4 AM to try to squeeze into the Reality Distortion speech. These things drive ardor, but I don’t find them to be a massive business lift.

I’m a technical journalist and editor since 1984, and a newsletter and blog publisher since 1995. I’ve used Macs in publishing and small business since 1987, and set up two little companies that rely on them, but I cut my teeth in the HP marketplace, in particular its HP 3000 business line. That vendor has killed off that product and turned its computing business on its ear. Innovation is just acquisitions for lots of HP’s inventing today. Apple couldn’t be more different.

For 25 years I’ve attended trade shows as big as 25,000 users, including close contact with the customers and show volunteers. Macworld 2010 didn’t exhibit a debacle, or slink away. I gotta disagree with the doom.

Yup, the show area was half as big. I didn’t care. I was drained after two days of interviews and demos and Q&A about features and business models and competitive stances. I said wow a lot, especially in the mobile apps floor space. I was impressed by products I didn’t know existed, because media notice is now fragmented and sliding so fast it’s harder to keep up than ever. What I didn’t miss at all was 75 booths’ worth of iPod accessory makers. Or the massive leather couches where you could watch media streamed onto TVs you could only buy at home if you hit the Lotto. Or the big honking booths from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft with lots to toy with, but experiences that would often not escape the labs as those products were released. At those booths you could talk to an engineer easy. But whatever they said to you then had to clear the business and marketing arms of the companies — and firms like Adobe and Microsoft have massive hurdles to clear in those areas.

Contrast that with the vendors who were on the floor at Macworld 2010. Smaller companies who often had innovation those larger beasts didn’t want to invest in. It was no problem in some cases to talk with the CEO of a little firm and believe they were really going to follow through with what they showed you. After 25 years of talking to software and hardware companies, you can tell sometimes what’s true faith and what is fantasy, or worse.

Yes, dead-on: There were less than 800 people in the room when Jon Gruber, Guy Kawasaki or David Pogue spoke, not the thousands at hand or watching remote screens to see Steve Jobs year after year. What did this matter? 700 media credentials were issued and the press room was busy, albeit not packed. People were watching and writing this week with a larger audience than the total attendance of 10 Macworlds. What’s more, their insight and summaries are going to be available to the Mac world on Web sites like this one for a lot longer than what you’ll remember from a suitcase full of data sheets and demo disks.

I’ll remember this: A David Pogue one-act as part of his keynote, a parody mashing up Steve Jobs’ life with It’s a Wonderful Life, played by the likes of The Gregory Brothers and LeVar Burton, that plucked the heartstrings of the Mac faithful — those of us who suffered through the 90s — just as ably as any tune that Jobs ever fiddled from a Macworld auditorium that only the lucky few could enter. (We saw last month how declined Steve’s demo skills have become, when he blew through his iPad demo points via Web access that looked slow and peppered with blue-box reminders of a Flash-less Internet experience. If you saw the show live, rather than the cleaned up Apple video, you can hear the chuckles from the audience while Steve-o showed the “best way to experience the Web.”) I love the iPad’s concept and believe in The Job’s ability to make it ready for work users. But I didn’t need Steve Jobs to distort the iPad reality on Jan. 27, or this week at Macworld.

It’s just as hard to predict the campaign of the iPad’s progress as it is to forecast the future of a trade show that’s already 25 years old and is working to change. But I saw changes in this year’s event that give me hope, the kind of faith I have in Apple’s pursuit of iPad business. I saw conference sessions, like a User Show with a half-dozen tracks, providing great training at several levels of expertise from seasoned consultants. I attended three sessions, and each gave me more value than the $27 I spent to attend them. The e-mail client showdown all by itself was worth the whole $79 one-day user conference pass. (You want to attend the conference sessions, really. Even for just one day. You could download every PowerPoint deck for every track, no matter what you’d paid for, once you entered the session hall in Moscone West. Talk about hidden value.) The show did heavy discounting this year, and you had to be pretty unplugged to need to pay for your Expo pass.

Macworld had gotten too big for all of it to be useful, bloated as bad as any Microsoft or Adobe product by the time Apple pulled away last year. The economics of this year’s experience are measured the most by how the exhibitors felt. I didn’t talk to a single one who was disappointed with floor traffic, and I didn’t even stay to see the Saturday floor, which had the potential for being unprecedented.

Who will be back in a booth in 2011? Well, there were 80 iPhone app companies squeezed into microscopic kiosks, with traffic so jammed I got lost and talked to a company that wasn’t even on my interview list. That kind of random messaging and learning is why we come to shows instead of sitting at our browsers to learn. The kiosk people will be back, and some will spring for more elbow-room to demo.

Go ahead and believe that the 2008 model of Macworld is the only one worth attending, if you want. I have a feeling that when you can get a sharp pencil like Jon Gruber to talk for an hour about Apple’s weak spots — the problems it needs to address — you have a more useful show than the one where everybody tiptoes around the El Jefe Vendor who is the patron of the Mac populace. I have January 25 circled for next year’s calendar, even while I admit there’s an outside chance that IDG collapses its business in the Mac expo market. But I bet not. It’s harder to build business than to rediscover it.

It’s tough times out there, which is a better explanation for a downsized show floor than “There’s No Apple” to bring its black-shirted staff up the road. I’ve talked to Apple Macworld staffers who were no more savvy than anything experienced talking about Entourage. (By the way, Microsoft seems to be moving away from Entourage to Outlook, so maybe nobody at MS cares about those template answers anymore.) I didn’t struggle to compare e-mail, or scanners, or backup products, or mass storage. I had an easier time for some of that because I didn’t have to hike more than a mile from hall to hall. People were getting by with less to exhibit, and you knew that those who were there were selling and building for the long run.

One 10×10 booth was staffed with eight people from a small but sharp company. They saved the square footage and cartage charges but sent their best. You need to have staffed an exhibit to know how this works, but as IDG you want that booth size to grow from kiosk to small to larger. Macworld got a reset of its economic model this year. You could forecast its demise. But that wouldn’t be a lot smarter than subscribing to Dell’s premature obituary for Apple.

You can let go of the old trade show model, if you try, and open your eyes to the potential for something better. I say let’s see, in person, what Macworld Expo can become. This looked to me like the first year that I attended Appleworld, not just Macworld. I didn’t observe a business event that was in trouble, just one in a state of change.