Stars from across the internet firmament - many barely out of their twenties - will next week descend on San Fransisco, California, for the world's largest web conference.

The chief executives of web 2.0 companies like Facebook and MySpace will take their place alongside more established media companies like Viacom and Microsoft to discuss the 'buzz topics' of the moment, such as how social networking sites can generate revenue and how media companies can profit from content that is increasingly being offered for free.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old chief executive of Facebook, the burgeoning networking site, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, the online auction house, and Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of NewsCorp, parent company of TimesOnline, will be among the names to knock heads and pick apart the sprawling universe of 'social media' known as web 2.0.

Alongside them will sit Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, Philippe Dauman, chief executive of Viacom, which still locked in a court battle with Google over the alleged unlicensed use of its content on YouTube, and Niklas Zennstrom, the co-founder of Skype and, more recently, Joost, the 'television-over the-internet' service.

Web 2.0 summit, now in its fourth year, is the largest internet conference in the world, and will be closely followed by chief executives trying to make sense of how best to spend their online advertising budgets at a time when the sites to which consumers are flocking are changing so rapidly, and the channels by which they receive content are increasingly fragmented.

Among the sessions on the agenda are 'Sipping From the Search Firehose', 'The Semantic Edge', 'Making Money in Video and Podcasting', and 'Personal Social Media Goes Mobile: Freeing Web 2.0'

Several highlights stand out. The 'open conversation' with Mr Zuckerberg and the related session - 'Facebook as a Platform' - will address the increasingly relevant question of how companies can take advantage of Facebook's enormous subscriber base by developing features - known as applications, or 'apps' - which members can download and share.

A recent campaign by Red Bull, the drinks firm, which involved distributing a 'scissors, paper, rock' game among the 40 million-plus users on Facebook, is seen by many analysts as a better example of how to do marketing in web 2.0 than, say, buying advertising space, or creating a profile for a company on Facebook. ("If you're Unilever you're hardly going to create a page in the hope that people will come and talk about toothpaste," one analyst said.)

Other sessions likely to be well-attended include 'The Semantic Edge', which will address the new breed of search engines attempting not make sense not just of keywords but whole phrases and sentences - so-called 'natural language search', and 'The Web App Revolution', which refers to how web-based content and services can increasingly be installed on a range of devices via little tools known as 'widgets'.

Then there are the talks, which will be delivered by a comprehensive group of web 2.0 professionals and 'entrepreneurs of the moment' including Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg, the 'used-ranked' news site, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, the 'micro-blogging' site, and Stewart Butterfield, general manager of Flickr, the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!.

Martin Varsavasky, chief executive of FON, the wireless internet company, will speak fresh from his firm's deal with BT to allow British-based customers to share their home broadband connections with passers-by, and Jeff Huber, who leads the technology development on Google's advertising platform, AdSense, will talk about how the company hopes to start serving ads alongside a range of content - including video, not just text.

"This conference brings together more big names that are relevant to web 2.0 than any other," Rebecca Jennings, an analyst with Forrester, said.

"The big topics right now are: how is the 'social web' going to look in 5 years' time. Is it worth investing in the media that are hugely popular now, like social networking, if that's all going to change? And where does the money come from. If I want to create social media, what is the business model?"

TimesOnline will be reporting from Web 2.0 Summit when it opens next Wednesday, as well as running a series of interviews with top technology chief executives - including those of eBay and MySpace, to coincide with the event.

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