Attention, all viewers who are planning to attend Macworld Expo Boston next month (all six of you): any thoughts on how we can make the best use of all that extra space? Seeing as the show will be held in Boston's brand spankin' new and oh-so-spacious convention center, and considering that there'll probably only be maybe two dozen attendees who'll bother to show up at all, and taking into account a truly startling reduction in vendors so far, we're thinking we can probably set up some killer games of floor hockey. On ATVs. Are ya up for it? C'mon, we'll do shirts versus skins, wear binoculars, and establish an elaborate semaphore-based code to signal our teammates from all the way across the show floor. It'll be great.

Okay, so it might not be quite deserted enough for ATV Floor Hockey, but we're betting there'll at least be enough empty floor space to let us build the world's longest Slip 'N' Slide. See, MacMinute says the upcoming show may well turn out to be "desolate," and we're not at all convinced that's an exaggeration. Scope out the official list of exhibitors and you'll see what MacMinute's talking about: there are only 40 vendors currently listed, and with less than six weeks to go before the show opens (tick... tick... tick...), we don't think there's much hope of the show coming close to its former numbers.

Consider this: last year's summer Expo in New York had 130 vendors, so as of right now we're probably looking at a 70% reduction in booth swag-- and that's just compared to last year, which was itself a show with a reduced Apple presence. Compare this year's 40 exhibitors to the 245 who showed up in 2002 and we're actually talking about a whopping 84% shrinkage from the last summer Expo with a Stevenote. So how many attendees are really going to bother showing up for 84% fewer free logo-emblazoned ugly t-shirts and oversize novelty paper clips? Especially since most of the major players in the Mac market are noticeably absent from the vendor list (Adobe; Macromedia; even Microsoft, despite the recent Office 2004 release), and smaller vendors don't usually have the cash to blow on quality promotional crap to give away. It's gonna be a sea of cheap ballpoint pens, we just know it.

Oh, sure, there's a far greater emphasis on the conference tracks this year (gee, we wonder why?), so there may be a fair number of professionalish Mac users showing up primarily to learn Things About Stuff™ off in the conference rooms, but the show floor sounds like it's just going to look, well, kinda... skeletal, maybe. So if you're not into the conferences and there are only going to be fortyish vendors on the show floor, why should you bother showing up? Well, IDG World Expo says you should come because "cool things happen when Mac users meet!" And you know, they're not wrong-- what's cooler than scoring a game-winning hat trick slap shot sixty yards from goal while clinging to an all-terrain vehicle belching exhaust at 70 miles per hour?