I was at Web 2.0 Expo New York from September 15^th through the 19^th.

Sun was a gold sponsor and we had a decent booth right near the entrance. I have posted a blog entry on zembly.com on zembly's success at the show.

I gave a BOF on the Anatomy of a Highly Scalable Facebook Application on Wednesday night.

Given that I was the only person from the zembly team that made it to the East Coast, I could not attend too many sessions. I was ably assisted by an SE from the NY area, Robin Wilensky. Even though I had submitted an abstract for the Web2Open unconference, I did not have the time to present there! I did, however, attend the keynote sessions.

On the first day, Fred Wilson opened proceedings by walking us through a history of New York's Web industry. "We live in the public" was his chant. It was good trip down the memory lane. Fred certainly provided us some keen insights. Things, however, went downhill from there. There were a series of speakers who spoke about general stuff. "Listen to your customers," one speaker said! "Technology changes, people don't," another speaker said.

The second day began with a keynote by Tim O'Reilly. To a large extent it was a reprise of his keynote at the San Francisco event. He continued to exhort people to:

• Work on stuff that matter
• Create more value than you capture
• Build technology that makes the world a better place

As he did in San Francisco, he concluded with the recital of the poem, "The Man Watching".

Clay Shirky gave an interesting talk on the Information Overload that is facing all of us. The video for this talk is available. If you want to be entertained, I would recommend viewing it.

On the final day, Tim O'Reilly interviewed Ariana Huffington. The funniest line was when she called Sarah Palin a Trojan Moose.