Congratulations to Ryan and Gillian Carson, and Lisa Price for putting on a wonderful conference. I especially enjoyed Yahoo’s Tom Coates and Dogster’s Ted Rheingold, who both talked about social communities on the web and how strong ones are built. In fact, a lot of the knowledge they had can be used to help grow the BuzzShout community. I realized there was a lot we should be doing, but aren’t yet. BuzzShout was created to help people cut through the hype of Web 2.0. As individuals, we don’t want to check out every single new website, web app, service, or mashup. If we collectively share our opinions on the few we do visit, then we’ll help each other figure out what is the best, and not have to visit the ones that suck. An interactive BuzzShout community will make a very useful and informative site where participation will help shape the future of the web. The larger we are, the more our opinions are heard.

I also enjoyed seeing some of the aesthetically-pleasing applications from digg labs that gives a larger, visual perspective on stories and how they’re doing on digg. These have been around for a while now, but I have never checked them out until yesterday. I find them useful as one thing I don’t like about digg is having to mull through multiple pages. Kevin also mentioned that there will be some new digg labs inventions launched within the next couple of months, so keep your eyes peeled on the Shoutblog for coverage. A commenter mentioned that users should be able to “digg” which digg labs ideas are implemented on the site. I thought that was a great idea, but Kevin said something about not being able to do that because of Calacanis being a competitor. Also see Rafe Needleman’s blog entry on some new digg features.

Although they weren’t presenting, I had the opportunity to speak at length with Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate. For those of you who don’t know, Thomas is a wonderful photographer (the photos in this post are his) as well as an investor in Kristopher’s Zooomr. They gave me some info about their newest additions which include a tagmap, comments on specific photos, and quicker upload speeds. Flickr has also came out with geo-tagging, but I look forward to even more innovative features that Kristopher confirmed will be coming out soon for Zooomr. Small companies like Zooomr have great opportunities to take on market leaders because they don’t have to deal with bureaucracy when taking on new projects.

Other blog posts about the conference can be found at Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, and Dan Farber’s write-up on Arrington, and Liz Gannes on GigaOm. Also check out Scott “Laughing Squid” Beale’s photos on his site.

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