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Future of Web Apps 2008 kicked off yesterday, and I was there to enjoy the proceedings…

As we arrived to register and pick up our passes, we were treated to a “surprise” courtesy of the crew from Carsonified:

• A Carsonified-branded jute bag — cool, but not sure I’d want to keep my laptop in there due to the total lack of padding.
• A numbered journal, pencil and sharpener — woo!
• A handwritten note from Gill Carson thanking us for attending — pretty nice considering the size of the event.

First we had the introduction from Ryan Carson, and the conference chairs, Simon Willison and Simon Wardley… including an acapella RIck Roll in honour of Ryan’s birthday!

Next up was Kevin Rose on “The Future of News”, which surprisingly didn’t get much of a crowd response. He talked about the ways in which he wants to grow Digg, and improve its relevance to its users. I thought this was pretty much on the money, as I used to be a heavy user of Digg, but got a bit turned off it when they broadened the scope of the site, allowing non-tech content to come in. I felt like it kind of diluted amount of news that was relevant to me. However, Kevin’s talk on the improvements they are making to their recommendation engine and taxonomy seem like they are thinking about exactly the same problem: how do they keep the site relevant to the largest number of users possible, whilst still taking into account people’s niche interests.

Other talks I enjoyed today included Blaine Cook and Joe Stump’s “Languages Don’t Scale” (language choice insignificant, concentrate on IO!); Stefan Fountain’s “Future of Mobile Web”; and the TechCrunch dragon’s den style startup pitches.

Looking forward to today’s sessions, and of course the live filming of Diggnation in the evening! I’ll be tweeting throughout the day (http://twitter.com/jimmahnow), so follow me and keep an eye on the #fowa search trend on twitter!