Ok so this is last weeks news but I went to FOWA (The Future of Web Apps) in London's ExCel center in London last Thursday and Friday.
I'm new to the conference scene (well at least conferences of interest) and I must say I feel quite inspired after going to lots of interesting talks.
For example, I founds Tim Bray's speech about the doom and gloom scenaro spreading to New Media very interesting.
The guy behind LOL cats was really inspirational. Ben Huh is the Chief Cheezburger (A.K.A. CEO) he bougth the icanhascheezburger.com domain not too long ago and it has grown very big very quickly. They have now buildt their portfolio (him and a group of investors) to none less than 8 domains - generating 2 million page views a day -- all driven by community contributions. The I Can Has Cheezburger? Network includes failblog.org, ihasahotdog.com, graphjam.com and punditkitchen.com. ICHC plans on continuing to grow its network of sites.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine. Prior to Mahalo.com's launch in May, 2007, he was an "Entrepreneur in Action" at Sequoia Capital, a position he held since December 2006. Jason co-founded and was the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a network of popular weblogs that was sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed senior vice president. In addition, he was named general manager of AOL's Netscape. Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Jason was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, which sold its flagship publication to Dow Jones. He had some wise words of wisdom which pretty much boiled down to "work your ass off and get the fruits of your labour later" which I kind of agree with.
I thought Facebook's Mark Zucherberg sucked (pardon the pun) - he dodged questions and didn't come accross as very enlightened about his own business.
All of the talks from FOWA is available as Webcasts on their Video Page
I also 'discovered' Twitter (I have semi-used twitter for a few years), but now I 'get-it', especially after downloading Twitteriffic for the iPhone and Spaz for my Mac.
Friendfeed was another discovery which cumninates all social web 2.0 feeds into one stream (Facebook, Youtube, Digg, Twitter etc...) and is a great addition to the social sharing hemisphere.
Diggnation was also spot on - really fun to see the community that has been built up and all in all I think the future is looking bright for the future of web apps with more events like this!