Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2008

I really enjoyed O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo this year, which took place in San Francisco on April 22-25. The Expo is a companion event to the Web 2.0 Summit, and “an expanded, inclusive gathering for the technology and business communities through a combined conference and tradeshow.”

I’ve been fortunate to be part of the planning process for the last two years as a member of the advisory board for the design and user experience track. I wasn’t able to attend a lot of sessions, since I was consulting onsite with a client the entire week, but there were several sessions I did attend.

As the creator of the event, Tim O’Reilly’s keynote was intelligent and inspirational. He urged everyone to ignore the headlines and the next hot app, but rather, to focus on solving the “big, hard problems”. My friend and editor of ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus, did a nice live-blog post of O’Reilly’s key points at RWW. You can also watch the video of the keynote below to really get a sense of his passion and message. It was one of the most inspirational and on-point talks that I’ve heard in a while.

One of the other keynotes I attended was Clay Shirky‘s. While watching him, I twittered, “enjoying clay shirky’s talk contrasting tv’s cognitive heat sink vs the architecture of participation’s cognitive surplus.” I highly recommend watching the video of his talk below or read the transcript of his keynote, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, at the blog for his new book, Here Comes Everybody. Not only is he engaging and entertaining, he illustrates that the shift that has occurred – the architecture of participation – is indeed, a fundamental and momentous shift in our cultural history.

Lastly, you can watch the other keynotes and various talks at the Web 2.0 Expo Blip.tv account.

Here are a few of the photos I took while there.