Just back from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. While I enjoyed my time there, I found the show to be pretty disappointing. It was held at the Berlin Fairground, which is a huge, cold, concrete building that makes you feel like a student again - or maybe it was just the bad coffee and cigarette smoke. A lot of the speeches were of the ‘pat on your back’ type which I found dull, though the following speeches were noteworthy:
David Recorden’s talk on Opening The Social Graph.
Kathy Sierra’s talk on Creating Passionate Users was fantastically insightful. I learned a lot of good stuff which we will be putting into practice.
Mark Boulton’s talk on Better Typography
James Kalbach’s talk on Designing Tag Navigation
And best of all was Jeremy Keith’s talk on Microformats: the Nanotechnology of the Semantic Web – an excellent speech that got me all excited about using Microformats on Sosius.
After my visit to Berlin I couldn’t help but feel that Europe has a long way to go to catch up to the current Web 2.0 buzz you see in the US. We’ll just have to wait and see if next year’s European Web 2.0 expo will be up to scratch.