I've been holed up in meetings or in my hotel room working more than I've been over at the show, so my ability to speak as johnny-reporter-on-the-spot is rather limited. That said, here are a few impressions:

--General Web 2.0 Expo filings:
http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/content/home
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/web_20_expo_san_francisco/

--Microsoft Live Mesh announcement: Some folks like where Ray Ozzie's taking this, although Linux support isn't on the horizon. I'm sure you've got an opinion. Share it with us....
https://www.mesh.com/web/developer.aspx

--The cloud! The social web! The ambient computing meme!
Tim's keynote was terrific; reminds us that there are a lot of very good reasons to keep doing what we're doing...
Check out the video: http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2008/04/techwebtv_tim_oreilly_at_web_2.html

--Clay Shirky's http://www.shirky.com/ mini-talk, during the keynote, draws from his new book, *Here Comes Everybody*. http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536/
Interesting notion: If you take all the hours you wasted watching Gilligan's Island reruns and could instead use them to create *anything* on the web, what a weirdly different and better place our world would be. If the book (which I'll be buying) is half as good as the talk--funny, thought provoking--it'll be worth it.
And Tom Hanks definitely would play the lead in the movie about Clay Shirky's life, "Here Comes Clay!"

--Terrific preso yesterday by Jacob West on The Dark Side of Ajax: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/detail/731
Smart guy with lots of interesting case studies/war stories. This was a money session: Learning from Jacob saves your company $$$. He's got a book, too: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Analysis-Addison-Wesley-Software-Security/dp/0321424778/

--Widgets widgets everywhere. APIs galore. http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/content/exhibitors
--And Moscone is thick with startups (some in their sophomore year). http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/content/launchpad

--Unexpectedly strong interest all week (including from a few non-conference meetings and conversations) on multi-touch interface development. Anyone else exploring this? Let us know.

--Ryan Stewart happy to see so many Flex apps at the show. http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1395
He's also happy to see Thermo buzz continuing to build.And so yeah, how do people feel about the term "devigner"? Better than "devsigner." Not as good as "creative developer", IMO. Or how about "bicamerally-brained" .

--In Duane Nickull's session right now; "Ontologies for the Enterprise":
http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/detail/2367
These fundamental IT/CS concepts are more applicable than ever as non-computer scientists build a folksonomic and semantic web. Bits of this talk will likely find their way into Duane's book *Web 2.0 Patterns* (co-authored with Dion Hinchcliffe and James Governor). And he makes this stuff funny *and* interesting.... More people than usual snapping photos of his screens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(computer_science)

--Interesting and timely session yesterday: "Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen",
http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/detail/2266
in which Twitter's Alex Payne was quite cool about dedicating his half of the talk on the scaling issues at Twitter.
This, on the heels of Blaine Cook's leaving his position as Architect at Twitter (reportedly due to those same scaling issues).
More here about the arguably silly controversy: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/276232231/

Lots of other links to the show here:
http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/content/news-coverage

The general riff is that no matter what the economy's going to be doing over the next couple of years, Web 2.0's influence is huge and growing: As one blogger headlines put it "Web 2.0 Goes to Work". Live on the east coast? There'll be a Web 2.0 Expo in NYC this Sept. http://www.web2expo.com/