In years past the fall event filled the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and spilled outside into a tent, complete with lavish receptions at hotels around town. This week the 10-year-old show here filled one corner of the convention center, including the space it shared with a related exhibit called Streaming Media East. Keynote speakers droned on about the next-generation Internet in half-empty halls, while the number of companies showing their wares dwindled to 126 from more than 700 a few years ago.

Bill Oh, one of six employees at Massachusetts-based Bethel, said he and the company president made the sign the night before by printing it on computer paper, gluing the paper onto cardboard and cutting the cardboard into pieces. Oh said Bethel spent $10,000 to attend the three-day exhibit and considered it money well spent despite the show's turnout -- projected at 15,000 attendees, down from roughly 40,000 a few years ago.

Internet World is hardly alone in downsizing. Tradeshow Week magazine has predicted attendance at trade shows this year will run around 56 million, a far cry from the estimated 140 million folks who attended such networking events in 1999. Exhibit spending tends to lag attendance changes because of the planning required, but it has already fallen in most industries. Trade show exhibit space dropped 1.4 percent last year -- its first decline in more than a decade -- and is expected to fall an additional 2.5 percent this year, according to the investment bank Veronis Suhler Stevenson.