Last Friday Jose and I attended dConstruct 2008 in Brighton, an annual conference aimed at those “designing and building the latest generation of social web applications”.

Held at the Brighton Dome, there were hundreds of people in attendance, representing companies and web startups from all over the world; and in terms of insight into the increasingly social nature of the web, the conference was a tremendously informative and constructive way to spend a Friday!

Amongst the speakers on the day were Daniel Burka (creative designer at Digg and co-founder of budding social network Pownce), Matt Jones and Matt Bidulph (the co-founders of Dopplr, a social network for ‘intelligent travellers’, Steven Johnson (co-creator of FEED, plastic.com, and most recently, the particularly interesting ‘hyperlocal media site’, outside.in), Tantek Çelik (ex Chief Technologist at Technorati), as well as several other experts in the rapidly-growing field of a phrase we heard all too many times during the day: the social web.

Some of the more interesting revelations during the day for us included the concept of microformats, a simple, open data format built upon the web standards, which (amongst many other uses) combine with widely-adopted web standards to help create a ’semantic web’. One example of a useful bonus of microformats would be an address listing on a web page - if marked up as such, you can find this address on one of the popular mapping sites in a single click, rather than having to copy-paste and bring it up on a separate site.

outside.in was a particularly interesting idea for me - making the web more geographical. Since everything else we do in life is centred on where we are, it stands to reason that the internet should become more like this as it evolves. Whilst it’s still in its relatively early stages of development, I definitely recommend checking out the site and seeing how it works - it’s far too intricate to go into any level of detail here!

Finishing off proceedings was an extremely interesting talk on ‘the system of the world’ from acclaimed web developer (and deep thinker, clearly) Jeremy Keith, who spoke mainly about certain patterns found in nature and how they relate to social interactivity, the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and how today’s web developers can encompass these concepts in design and functionality. At least… that’s what I got out of it.

While Jose and I felt very much out-nerded by an entire auditorium of people clutching Macbooks and iPhones (we made do with an Eee PC and an N95), there was certainly a lot to take in; and there was plenty of transferable knowledge for us to work into our site designs, web apps, and overall understanding of social bookmarking and networking sites.

All in all, an extremely interesting day, with plenty to remember, and plenty to have forgotten thanks to the constant deluge of information… thankfully dConstruct have been kind enough to deliver all the sessions thanks to the magic of podcasting - take a look if you’re that way inclined, or perhaps if you’ve just got a few hours to burn!

Check out the dConstruct08 group on Flickr for photos of the event!