I didn’t bring my laptop on the Friday, partly due to the monumental drinking session lined up for after Diggnation, and partly as there was a lack of wifi rendering it pretty useless (damn, ok, that was the last time).

To make up for it though, you can find the slides from the talks here:

http://www.slideshare.net/carsonified/slideshows

There are some brilliant talks up there – I’d highly recommend looking through them.

You can also find some of the vids and highlights from the talks here:

http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

Congrats on the Carsonified team on getting these up so quickly – awesome job.

No photos from my camera, from the last day (again, due to the high likelyness I’d lose my camera in a drunken moment), but I’ll be going through the masses of flickr accounts and pulling the decent ones in.

It’s been a great start to the day with talks from Kevin Rose, Blaine Cook, Joe Stump and Edwin Aoki all giving great insight into the inner workings of the webapp kings. (Photos to come)

Less good has been the talk by Alvin Woon, Stefen Fountain (after the initial sales patter, I wandered off to find some internet), and of course, the Wifi.  Or rather, lack thereof.  Thankfully Sun Microsystems are onhand with a set of boxes ready for internet use.

*update* ok, the internet at FoWA suffered from epic fail all day long.  My updates because of this were limited, to the point where I decided not to bring my laptop for day 2.  Probably a good thing considering how many free beers were on offer, but that’s a moot point.

My favourite talk of the day goes to the awesome Ben Huh of icanhazcheezburger.com fame – unfortunately, there’s no video up yet from FoWA, but I found this from another conference:

Enjoy.

For those of you that didn’t make it to last years, here’s the run up to the live filming of Diggnation London!

Pre-show Diggnation London from Pierre B on Vimeo.

See ya’ll there!

The Golden Ticket for those of you that don’t know, is a Willy Wonka style offering from Ryan Carson over at the ever awesome Carsonified – write a blog post about why you want to win the Golden Ticket, get 25  or more comments and enter the prize draw.

Anyway, being that I’ve left it so long, I’ll cut straight to the point… Why I’m craving the Golden Ticket.

I’ve worked in the t’interweb business for 10 years now, and have managed to keep it a passion (if anything, it’s become more of a passion – I guess I’m lucky that I’ve got a job I enjoy so much). However, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by people who, despite working in this awesome industry, just seem to lack the passion for it. When I dashed over to FOWA London last year, I felt at home in a sea of people passionate about what they do – and better still, what the possiblities that lay ahead are.

To be fair, in my time I’ve been lucky enough to work with some wonderful passionate people – but those individuals are few and far between. Maybe, just maybe, with the chance to get amongst others who feel the same way as I do, the smile on my face that I bring back at the end of the day (not to mention the photos, videos and mountains of goodies), may inspire some of the other I work with to consider this wonderful web as more than just a 9 til 5. (*ahem* 9 til 6 if you’re a Londoner like myself).

There’s a small and slightly personal note to this post – my intentions aren’t completely selfless… For the past few months I’ve been working on a side project that will hopefully one day soon blossom into a fully fledged webapp. Work has been flagging with the torrent of stuff that has taken my time up over the past 4 weeks, but I’m hoping that with a bit of inspiration, some serious networking, and of course, a few friendly faces to bounce ideas of, it may just come to fruition.

Spare a second to comment if you can. I’ll be eternally grateful!

Nath.