James Galvin

Was over in London for the FOWA. I’ve been to London a few times in the past couple of years, but still can’t get over what an insanely expensive city that is. Breakfast in the hotel, for a basic fry: £21! That’s €30 or $43. Future of Web Apps conference was on in the Docklands, a long haul from Cork using just about every means of transportation bar skateboard.

At FOWA, the amount of Macbooks around the place was astonishing – I’d guess that at least 9 out of 10 laptops at the event were made by Apple. The business track was a little bit basic – people giving too much of the same old common-sense advice and not enough real examples and numbers. The developer track was a bit better and people were happy to give the facts and figures. Matt Mullenweg spoke a bit about the architecture behind WordPress.com. It is good to hear first-hand about what is involved behind the scenes – if I heard correctly they’re running 300 servers! Kevin Rose spoke about his experiences in launching Digg and Pownce – interesting to note that they moved from PHP (Digg) to Python (Revision3) to Python & Django (Pownce). The lads from Dapper gave a nice overview of practical aspects of the semantic web, although not everyone was convinced by their reliance on the community. Matt Bidulph from Dopplr spoke about integration with external sites & services, highlighting the need for portability in social networks, and open standards such as OAuth.

I won’t go into any more detail about the talks, but if you are interested, then I’m sure you can find some reports on Technorati.

The expo was disappointing – one or two interesting companies but hardly any free stuff. Had to settle for a few stress balls off Sun and some pens from Zoho. There was one Irish group there, Just Routes – a few guys from DCU(?) who have developed a route planner for public transport. Dublin routes are currently mapped, so this should be a handy tool for getting around the city. Good luck to Dave & co with that.

Without a doubt, the highlight of the event was Diggnation. At first I assumed it was just another podcast. I’ve seen some sturdy servers buckle under the weight of attention from Digg, but I still had no idea that there was such a large and passionate community. Long before the show was due to start, hundreds of people were packing at the front of the hall. “Those are the fan boys”, I heard someone remark. Soon enough, the place was literally crawling with student nerds wearing Diggnation t-shirts rattling off top 10 ways of running Ubuntu on the iPhone. These guys knew the ins and outs of every story that had appeared on Digg recently. A girl with a “marry Me, Alex” banner clambered on stage to get a hug from one of the presenters. They discussed the Halo 3 launch, YouTube ads, Amazon’s DRM-free music store, and other top stories from Digg this week (including the “fucked up” account of a boy who survived a two hour flight on the wing of a plane).