At least that's how the current status of the Web economy is perceived by Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle, the head honchos of the hyper-exclusive and highly influential Web 2.0 Summit conference, which runs from Monday to Wednesday in San Francisco.

"We're excited this year to be dealing with the biggest set of transitions in the Internet economy since the dot-com bust. In fact, it's way bigger than the dot-com bust," O'Reilly said recently during .

To illustrate the wrangling for market share and opportunities that is going on, O'Reilly and Battelle have set up with clever cartography that includes the Clouds of Infrastructure, the Union of Social Networks, the Land of Search, the Kingdom of E-Commerce, the Oceans of OS and UI, the Subcontinent of Advertising, Location Basin and the Plains of Content.

All those areas are considered "points of control" and will be discussed at length in on-stage interviews and panels at , where the speaker roster as usual features industry superstars, including top executives from Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Research in Motion and Adobe.

For O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, the Internet economy is at a stage now where players have known where the money is, for a while, the period of hyper-growth has settled down and opportunities for expansion involve invading others' stomping ground.