Yesterday I got back from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. There were many interesting sessions, and I, for the most part, took notes! Here is a short list of my five favorite speakers, in no particular order:

1. Cal Henderson's whirlwind introduction to video on the web. Cal really likes speak really fast, to make typos in his slides and to cuss, all of which makes for a very informative and entertaining hour.
2. John Resig's talk about Processing.js, his port of Processing to canvas. I'm constantly dealing with graphics on the web, and it's awesome to have such a powerful library available. Pretty demos, too!
3. Jason Fried's short but sweet keynote talk, focusing on minimalism in product management, and proper (read: very narrow) scoping of features. The philosophical question of "what would your software be like if it was physical?" struck me as a very useful thing to think about.
4. A browser panel including Chris Wilson from MS, Brendan Eich from Mozilla and an unnamed developer from Chrome responded to a nice set of questions about future directions of browsers. Poor Chris got a beating IE7's flaws, lack of canvas/SVG support, barriers to plugin development for IE.
5. Geir Magnusson Jr delivered an excellent introduction to scaling data in the cloud.

I also had the chance to talk to and bounce some ideas off of Pete Koomen, a Google App Engine product manager. He told me that there are plans both for process scheduling, and for support of django-1.0 down the road, but of course gave no time frame for either. Overall, the conference was interesting - there were other good sessions and keynotes which I simply haven't bothered to write up. The crowd wasn't very technical though, comprising in large part designers, marketers and managers.