A chance to chat in real life about the Internet’s impact on Americans at home and work drew more than 300 people to the Chinese Software Professionals Association this month.

“I’m here because most of my clients are in e-commerce,” said PriceWaterhouseCoopers CPA Lynn Tsui. Her assessment: “The Internet is hot.”

Speakers included Lawrence Wilkinson, vice chair of Oxygen Media, a women-focused “portal site”; and Infoseek founder Steve Kirsch, who addressed the proliferation of such sites, which offer free email, chat rooms and other services to bring visitors back over and over again.

Gone, he said, were the relatively old days of three or four years ago, when he had the chance, he said, to buy Yahoo! for far less than the $145-$150 per share it commands now. He joked, too, about how his own company is being bought out by Disney. “My first company was a mouse company, and now I’m being acquired by a mouse company.”

He predicted that advertising -- which most Web sites count on to provide most of their revenue -- will pan out, saying that “only 1,000 sites in 10 years will be advertising supported.”

Already, “click-through” rates on banners hover in the single digits for even large sites. “Zero margin, people are realizing, means zero margin,” Kirsch said. “With more competition, you’re going to see worse margins.”

Other speakers included Kenneth Wirt, CEO and cofounder of Riffage.com, a Web music site; and ZDTV News Director Harry Fuller, who spoke about the convergence of the Web and television. But the biggest draw for Jacob Hsu was Steve Westly, eBay’s vice president of marketing and business development.

Asked why he was there, Hsu, director of business development at software consulting company SymbioSys Inc., explained: “I’m here to learn more about eBay’s business model.”

Though many attendees were tied to businesses who have staked everything on the Web, the conference drew plenty of the merely curious. Said Rational Corp. software engineer Shawn Lian: “I’m thinking about working in Internet -- just thinking.”

The CSPA, founded in 1988, is a nonprofit organization with over 2000 members, both Chinese American and others. For more information, visit www.cspa.org .