I could swear at one point during the Digital Hollywood Fall ‘06 opening reception I heard someone wonder out loud about making another deal or having another drink. Then again, I suppose I could have been hallucinating, dizzy from the constant buzz bombardment at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel. There’s no way to tell how many deals are really going down here—and how many of them actually involve direct sums of money as opposed to trades, rev shares and the like. Then again, I have no doubt there’s some shopping going on from the VC perspective and some more than wishful sales thinking from the start-up side hinged to the latest Holy Grail, the pending YouTube sale to Google.

Then there’s “the widget economy,” offered up from FeedBurner’s Don Loeb during a late afternoon panel on “Advertising NEXT.” It’s already the subject of an upcoming conference from Niall Kennedy and Om Malik but from the looks I got when I mentioned it later safe to say the concept is still fairly new. Whether it’s widgets as badges of loyalty and brand or conveyors of ads, games, rss feeds and more, someone interested enough to add widgets to their desktop probably is providing a commercial opportunity. Loeb, who has a commercial stake of his own given FeedBurner’s RSS widgets, said he thinks “the widget economy” is going to change how brands monetize their content. Maybe so. Then again, Loeb also used badge as a verb when describing his brand loyalty to Toyota’s Prius as in “I want to badge that wherever I live” whether its MySpace or “my” blog. The context for his comments: a description by Ian Wessman, director of creative technology, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, of a user-gen campaign coming up for client Toyota.

So where does Web 3.0 fit in? Wherever a way of spinning forward is needed although Tim Chang, principal, Gabriel Venture Partners, did a fairly slick job of trying to mine the elements while he moderated a panel on “Web 2.0: The Next Iteration.” Some of them: true mobile integration, comprehensive ad models, start-ups with a real business plan baked in, user produced, content aggregated around users, layers of privacy and trust. Then again it could be the kind of brilliant blue mirage you see in the distance after emerging from hours of meetings in windowless rooms.