What can I say…I’ve had a great time in New York.  I reconnected with old friends and made new ones too.  I also happened to learn a few things along the way about the future of the web.

I got up around 9 am and was still feeling the effects of our wine escapade from the previous night.  I went downstairs and got a couple hats for the kids, checked-out, and then hopped in a cab over to the Javits Center.  You could tell that it was winding down as most of the sessions were empty.  My favorite session of the day was definitely The State of Web Development which featured a lengthy talk on JavaScript and AJAX.

After lunch I was off to the airport.  I originally set up a shuttle to take me to the airport right from Javits.  They had a booth there which I had made reservations at yesterday.  Apparently, the genius that was working booked me for a shuttle that left the day before I purchased my ticket.  The guy working informed me he couldn’t get a shuttle until 4:30.  Of course, that would make me late for my flight, so he processed a refund and I went to hunt down a cab.

After around three minutes, I hailed a cab and told him I was going to JFK.  I was riding in the cab for a couple minutes when I glanced over and noticed this:

That’s right…BUTT WAQAR!  Are you kidding me?  I’m looking around for the hidden cameras.  I mean, there’s no way this guys name is Butt.  Then I thought to myself, “My name is Lindsey…so who am I to judge!”.

The trip to JFK was long.  I spent an hour and a half with Butt driving to JFK, 40 minutes getting out of the city alone.  Here’s my last picture of the city before we turned into the Midtown Tunnel.

We finally made it to the airport around 5:00 pm which gave me plenty of time to make it for my flight.  Once again, I headed to the Red Carpet Club to enjoy a drink and relax a bit before my flight.  The inbound plane was a couple minutes late, then I boarded and sat down in 6D…again.  After about a 45 minute wait in the queue for take off, we made our way back to LA.  I snuggled up in the Westin Comforter and pillow and slept for almost the entire flight, I was wiped!

Thanks for a great trip NY.  Hope to see you soon…

Woo Hoo!  I learned something new!

It was actually a great day all around.  I was sitting in a session when a colleague of mine from LA text messaged me asking if I was at 2.0.  I met up with him in one of the marketing sessions and afterwards we talked for a bit before he ran to a lunch meeting.

While he was at the meeting, I stepped into a developers session on SEO.  Finally!!!  I learned something.  This was a fantastic session put on by Nathan Buggia, who is the Lead Program Manager for the Microsoft Webmaster Center.  The great thing about the session was that it wasn’t just SEO 101, he went into great detail about the intricacies of creating websites for search.  He even provided us with a link to download his Powerpoint presentation.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with my colleague Bob, roaming the convention floor and discussing the true future of web technologies.  Having these discussions with Bob were probably more beneficial than most of the sessions.

After Bob took off, I headed back to the hotel before making my way over to Wine 2.0 to meet up with Liz and her friends.  The event was fantastic.  Great people pouring great wine.  I wish they had something like this in LA because it is a very cool event.

I knew going in that one of the highlights of the Web Expo would be hearing Jason Fried speak.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Jason, he currently runs 37signals and also developed Ruby on Rails.  His talk was great, very informative, precise, and to the point.

I also attended sessions on “The reinvention of marketing and PR” and “Lesson’s learned in scaling and building social systems”.  Both were interesting, but I was still hoping to learn more.  I still haven’t had that “wow” moment yet.

After the sessions ended, there was a “Booth Crawl” where exhibitors had the opportunity to showcase their products and hand out free booze.  I thought there might be some cool startups, but it was mostly large corporations.  The coolest gadget is the Microsoft Surface platform.  It a table-top touch based interface and it is awesome.  I’m curious to see what practical applications it can be used for.  

Later that evening, I met up with my friend Liz from LMU and her friends.  Liz works for KPMG and was transfered out here from LA a few months ago.  It was great to get out and experience the city with real New Yorker’s even if they are LA transplants.