FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

I had avoided the keynote talks up until Friday - because on paper (and on report from some people who did attent) they just sounded like they were companies flogging their wares. Friday was different though. Tim O’Reilly interviewed the CEO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz, who gave some insight into the company’s very-recent purchase of MySQL, which he was confident would drive hardware sales. I have my doubts as to the size of the tail Sun will get from the purchase of MySQL (which runs smoothly on practically any platform you can think of) - but I’m sure this guy knows what he’s talking about.

The highlight of the Keynote was Dan Lyons (Fake Steve Jobs), who talked about the creation of his blog parodying the Apple CEO and other tech luminaries, and then his eventual outing as the creator of the blog by his own editor at Forbes. Dan was totally hilarious.

Matt Mullenweg of Automattic talked about new developments with his incredibly popular Wordpress blogging engine, including new photo-responsive themes and a move towards automatically suggested content on Wordpress.com. Matt Cutts of Google closed the Keynote with an incredibly dull talk on how Google approaches the problem of sites that try to cheat the PageRank system.

I have been so incredibly impressed by the guys from Adaptive Path that I had to go to see the talk given by Dave Verba on Agile Development. Dave is a co-author of the new book “Subject to Change” written with the Adaptive Path team. He gave some good background on the Agile development methodology; and in the questions afterwards he really got down to nuts and bolts on topics like cost control and documentation. A very, very useful session.

After three more semi-technical talks on High Performance Websites (Steven Souders - Google), oAuth (Scott Fleckenstein - Get Satisfactioj) and Casual Privacy (Kellan Elliott-McCrea - Flickr, whose slides self-destructed minutes before his talk) we were all done and dusted.

What a week. I’ve had the great fortune to meet and talk to the best people working on the web, and they have been kind to pass on their own knowledge to all of us attending the Expo. An incredibly useful and enjoyable week. Thanks to all who organised the trip from InvestNI and Enterprise Ireland. See you in 2009? :)