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.

In the vacuum of the month before the doors opened, nobody could tell how spry the old guy’s step was going to be yesterday. The conference organizers invited the right people, to be sure. They got an Emmy winner in David Pogue to kick off the opening day with a show so complete it even included a play about Steve Jobs, written as a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. They got Levar Burton to play Steve Jobs, so the actor who created Geordi La Forge on Star Trek could swap adulation with Pogue. “I can’t believe I get to meet you,” they each said.

But it’s one thing to put on a good one-act and another to fill the seats. A few hundred yards away from the play, the bodies were thick in the center of a bustling Macworld 2010 Expo floor. “Steve Jobs isn’t here,” Pogue said to start his keynote. But the Apple faithful were, and probably will be even more by tomorrow, the first weekend day in decades for this conference.

You had to be patient, in the face of the Cool New Stuff all around, to squeeze through some aisles and into some sessions. Like Burton, though, people seemed to know that this meeting about the Mac has roots, deep enough to weather the chill Apple showed to the show.

Burton came into the public’s eye the year before the Mac was born, the Reading Rainbow host who’s now in his 50s and producing. Pogue is 46, and neither fellow looked anything but genuine in his child-like ardor for Apple’s solutions. Out on the expo floor there were plenty more less famous acolytes and experts to testify to a shinier future, with evidence of their creations on display.

Macworld is so much bigger than just the Mac these days, and what’s been sloughed off of this event isn’t being missed. For every absent Adobe booth there was an expanded Crash Plan exhibit, where the back up company showed a product range wide enough to be free for The People or priced to help corporations protect untold acres of data. Crash Plan was giving out $60 licenses to everybody who visited its booth. Adobe might have been here before, but I never walked away from their booth holding a free tool that could keep my creations alive.

If I ran a company and wanted to save money on my utilities, I would look into the asset management software from Absolute Software. Tucked away into the Enterprise Desktop Alliance booth, the company showed the sort of product you would expect for corporate servers, tracking the use of Macs on a network to show when they could be put to sleep to reduce power consumption. The software scales from a handful of Macs to thousands, in one office or across an organization’s continental network.

The products sold through Dr. Bott include Blue Microphone’s Mikey, emerging in a new model tuned up to grab meeting notes as well as close-up note dictation. It swivels toward the subject of your video you’re taking with the iPhone. It’s got a line-in port to use for phone recording and three “volume” settings on the gadget that plugs into an iPhone or iPod Touch, new gain settings to help you get the sound onto a file headed for your Mac. Once it’s there, the new Scribe software from MacSpeech will help push those spoken words into text. The software was so new to production release that they were burning DVDs at the back of the booth to tuck into boxes. But it was also being sold at about a 40 percent discount.

That sums up the draw of Macworld, for the faithful who’ve come here for years. Something new, unveiled in the sparkle of a sea of the excited, sold at a steep deal and explained in a way the Web can never match. It was enough of a valentine to why we love Apple’s products to bring a tear to this old guy’s eye. Of course, it helped that the moment was echoing It’s a Wonderful Life‘s finale, when “Steve Jobs” learns that there wouldn’t have been the Web, or Wired Magazine, or popular computers, or Pixar, if he hadn’t invented the Mac.

And it helped if you were old enough to know and love the movie as well as the long haul away from that darkest year of 1998, as Pogue’s play pointed out, when Apple lost $1.7 billion and the last non-Jobs CEO was leading the Mac over a cliff. If a Mac’s life could imitate art, the ardor of the audience and attendees here showed a lively pulse for the products of tomorrow, showed today.

This is my fifth Macworld but the first without an Apple mothership hovering in the expo’s molten core. We’re all waiting to see what the impact of the missing lead vendor will be on this 25-year tradition. Registration lines seemed light this afternoon, although the media desk had a steady stream of reporters and bloggers. It might just be a feeling, but the attitude at the press registration desk smacked of genuine gratitude for our attentions.

One sign of scaling back is right here in the press room. It might be an artifact of a new decade of computer journalism, but gone are the 24-inch iMacs hooked to high speed boardband cables. No serious journalist would be without a laptop here. In shows past, even Microsoft organized a on-floor corral for the media’s blogging use.

But the show’s organizers seem undaunted, even if Steve Jobs did blast his salvo of new product two weeks ago today right next door at the Yerba Buena Arts Center. Few attendees of Macworlds ever got inside the hall where Jobs introduced things like the iPod, iPhone and more. I squeezed in for the Intel Mac announcement in ’06 by getting up at 4:30 and standing on line like a supplicant to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

This year’s event substitutes The New York Times tech columnist David Pogue for that leadoff keynote spot, to be held here in Moscone North in a room larger than the old site for Apple keynotes. Pogue has become a budding video and media star over the last few years, with regular spots on CBS news, plenty of video on the NYT site, and an entertaining manner to match Jobs’ enterprising swagger.

So “Late Night with David Pogue” kicks off at 9 AM tomorrow, followed by the first of the three Macworld Best of Show presentations at lunch. A group of solution providers who call themselves Indie will work for media attention here in about a half-hour or so, followed by a wider confab in the same room. About 20 of us are tapping away and talking here at 4PM. It may be hard to judge how well-subscribed this New Era is, lacking an Apple keynote or booth. That matters more to the organizers, who must impress the expo vendors, than attendees. There’s plenty to learn here, both at the booths as well as in conference sessions.