As many of you are aware the Web 2.0 Expo was just held in San Francisco. This was one of the best conferences I have attended in years. Not only did the presentations and speakers offer a wealth of info, but I was also able to meet a lot of very interesting people who I want to work with in the future. For those of you that have never attended, I highly recommend coming in 2008. If I had to choose only one conference to go to, this would be it.

Below are some of the highlights:

High Performance Websites

Yahoo had a great presentation on faster loading web pages. It was fairly technical, but a must read for anyone doing business on the net. Yahoo broke down the presentation into 14 rules. All these rules were based off research Yahoo conducted on its own web properties including sites not branded under the Yahoo umbrella. Also be sure to check out the upcoming YSlow Firefox plugin.

Getting Funded

This had to be one of the most packed presentations at the conference. And for good reason too. Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC and Rob Hayes of First Round Capital had a great presentation on getting funded. The presentation was broken down into 10 rules. The question and answer section is what really made this presentation stand out. Ofcourse there were tons of people looking to get funded and came ready with great questions and anecdotes. I’m not sure if the presentation is online, but check out the description on the Web 2.0 Expo site. May want to check to see if it gets posted on SlideShare in a few days.

Digg Architecture

Another excellent technical presentation focused on scalability and web architecture. Digg was amazingly launched on a $2,000 investment and $99 a month web hosting. Talk about low barrier to entry!!! Owen Byrne, one of the early developers of Digg explained how the architecture changed as traffic grew. He also gave some interesting info about how back end development was affected by capitol injection. Digg is basically running on a LAMP stack using memcached for performance and Lucene for search.

eCommerce 2.0

This presentation by Kip Voytek from R/GA was a very nice mix of marketing, sales, and interaction design information. The presentation focused on how the traditional marketing paradigm of AIDA (Awareness, Interest/Information, Decision/Desire, Action) in the Web 2.0 arena creates a “whirlwind” because the ‘I’ and ‘D’ phases account for much of the user interaction. Mapping this out shows a funnel type of graph. And in Kip’s words, “Embrace the funnel”. Kip also talked about how eCommerce data 1.0 was product catalog and customer information. Now ecommerce data 2.0 is product catalog, customer information as well as user generated content & aggregate behavior (“people who like this also buy this”). Very cool stuff!