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Leonard Lin put together an excellent list of the presentations at Web 2.0 Expo, complete with links to slides and video when available. All of the presentations are worth checking out, but I wanted to point out the ones on the list from Yahoo (not all slides are available yet -- we will add to the list as they become available):

A Flickr approach to Making Sense of the World, from Rev Dan Catt of Flickr

Capacity Planning for Web Operations, from John Allspaw of Flickr

Grasping Social Patterns, from Christian Crumlish of Yahoo! Developer Network (from Ignite SF)

Tagging: Opportunities and Challenges of Scale, from Kakul Srivastava of Flickr

Also, be sure to check out CTO Ari Balogh's keynote in which he introduces Y!OS (the Yahoo! Open Strategy) and Neal Sample's deep-dive into Y!OS.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Developer evangelist Christian Heilmann was captured in Paris late last year, humoring a post-prandial crowd of European web developers and sharing the wisdom of web standards, as well as a humorous bit on how (and when) to make the international sign for "bullsh*t." He also discusses the benefits of web standards and the value of taking the long view, for increasing the resilience, flexibility, and maintainability of web projects.

You can watch the video, thanks to the generous permission of the Paris Web 2007 conference organizers.

Or take a quick trip through Chris's presentation, thanks to SlideShare.net:

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Popularity: 34% [?]

Keep an eye out for Yahoos in San Diego this week -- at the O'Reilly ETech 2008 conference (March 3-6) and the adjacent Graphing Social Patterns West:The Business and Technology of Social Networking Platforms (March 3-4).

On Monday at 1:15pm, Ian Kennedy will introduce Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog API: A Social Network Lookup Service in San Diego Ballroom B. At 1:30pm, he'll join panelists from Google, FriendFeed, Six Apart, and mSpoke, to discuss Social Networks and the Need for Feeds.

Meantime, over at ETech, food-hacker and engineer Marc Powell will present a tutorial called Kitchen Hack Lab in Marina Ballroom E at 1:30pm.

On Tuesday at 11:50am, in Marina Ballroom D, Elizabeth Churchill, from Yahoo! Research, will give a talk titled Users, Socializers, and Producers: How Internet Technologies are Changing Our View of Ourselves.

Stay tuned for later in the week; we've got something mythic in the works.

The Yahoo! Developer Network is sponsoring both these events. You'll know us by our mugs at the GSP Monday morning coffee break, at ETech we'll be at Booth #9. Stop by and say hello if you're in town, otherwise, check in at the Yahoo! Developer Network theater for ongoing video highlights, interviews, and coverage from GSP and ETech.

Yahoo! Developer Network Mixer photo by Jeff Kubina (2006).

Popularity: 37% [?]

On Monday, we went to Adobe Engage at the Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco. Billed as “Adobe's annual conversation on the future of applications and the web” – this gathering of “key thought leaders and influencers” was also a coming out party for Adobe AIR, which officially launched on the same day.

AIR allows web developers to package up existing web apps or Flash movies as full fledged desktop applications. The AIR runtime must be installed on a user's machine, but once in place – the same AIR app will run on Windows or a Mac, and a Linux implementation is due out soon.

Robert Scoble was at the front, live streaming the event from his cellphone via qik.com and his archived content provides an interesting bird's-eye view of the event. After introductory messages from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch, Adobe handed things off and let several different companies share the work they’ve been doing with AIR over the past year.

We saw a variety of cool apps, but perhaps more interesting were the types of teams that have been building them. Most of the AIR apps presented at Engage came from very small teams - internal propellerheads given the freedom to experiment and play in a very small corner of their organizations, all of whom have been attracted to using Flex and AIR. Even the names of these teams were telling: Yahoo's Media Innovation and Advanced Products groups met up with participants from the “Disruptive Innovation Group” at EBay, the Research Development team at the New York Times, and the NASDAQ Research group, to name some of the teams.

Yahoo! presented 3 apps. The first was a News Minibar application which we originally developed in AS2, wrapped in AS3, and converted into an AIR application. It sits on your desktop and keeps you up to date with weather, stock prices, and newsfeeds of your choice. We also released an updated beta version of our Blog Remix app, which lets you remix different music blog posts together and export them via HTML to your blog.

Our Yahoo! Live demo included a personal shout to the audience at Engage from music artist Tilly Key via her Y! Live page. Things got interesting when people watching Tilly’s page realized they were able to enter live comments that would appear in real time in front of the audience at Engage, but by that time Live product manager Michael Quoc had moved on. He was showing some of the cool mashups that external developers have already built using the Y! Live APIs. During the Q&A session afterwards, someone commented that we had “guts to show something like this with wifi, and all the other craziness..."

In all, the Engage event provided an early peek at interesting new technology and applications in 2008. Apparently many people (and companies) seem to agree that for building innovative software, less is more. As a developer on a small team in a big company, it’s great to see platforms emerge that allow small teams to build great things, “upon the shoulders of giants.”

Adobe Engage 2008 about to begin photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

Popularity: 35% [?]

After arriving at Yahoo! last year, I hoped to make myself at home by seeking out the "Women in Technology" group I assumed must exist at such a large company. Nothing turned up. Hmmm, maybe gender really is a non-issue here, I thought, being new to Silicon Valley. With so many geeks, there must be plenty of female geeks as well. After working for three years in compiler development, it was really refreshing to have a few women on my team, so I shrugged off my concern.

To get to know my new colleagues, I followed the weekly "Big Thinker" series featured on Yahoo!'s corporate intranet. For about eight weeks straight I read about guys (nominated by guys) who'd invented, championed, or delivered something awesome at work.Product meetings, tech talks, even the cafeteria definitely skewed male.Come on, I thought, there must be women 'big thinkers' doing awesome tech stuff around here too. How could I find them?

In Oct 2006, a few women scientists had just returned from the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference. Good timing. After an inspiring conference named for a pioneer programmer, I imagined they'd be primed for my idea – so I organized a meeting to start a women-in-tech initiative at Yahoo!. We met, launched a mailing list, and the community grew. That was just over a year ago.

Fast forward to the final weeks of 2007: Yahoo! Women in Tech is now 250 members strong and includes women from IT, web developers, software engineers, computer scientists, researchers, and tech recruiters. We've partnered with other organizations for women in tech, such as the Society of Women Engineers, FountainBlue, and Women 2.0. We've hosted events focusing on personal and professional development.

In 2007, we also reached out to more than 100 girls, to encourage them to enter science and engineering fields. My particular passion for K-12 outreach goes way back. It was sparked in grad school when I helped IBM run workshops for girls. I loved my work at IBM, but trying to impress kids by describing the thrill of compiler dev was a challenge.

At Yahoo!, we have the perfect environment to inspire the next generation of women to consider careers in computer science and engineering. Yahoo! is fun, colorful and, most important, it's highly visible to kids. After running our first Yahoo! Women in Tech outreach program for high school girls, I knew we were on to something. The reaction was huge: Many of the girls wanted to start work at Yahoo! immediately! Think of it as early-stage recruiting.

I want to send thanks to all the Women in Tech volunteers around the company (guys too!) who've contributed time and energy to forming a network, identifying great role models, and giving back to the community.

She's Geeky polaroids from Liz Henry. Used with permission.

Women in Tech banner photo by Karolina Buchner. Used with permission.

Popularity: 16% [?]