UPDATE: I’m officially going to FOWA in Miami, FL on Feb, 28th!

After reading a very informative post over at adii’s blog about 13 Web 2.0 Conference Events You Shouldn’t Miss, I was really inspired to go to several of them.

Future of Web Apps - 28 February to 1 March 2008

FOWA located in Miami, Florida is only a month and 6 days away. With speakers like Matt Mullenweg from WordPress and Biz Stone from Twitter, the entire speaker line up seems very diverse and interesting, but the true gold seems to be at the FOWA workshops.

If I were to attend, I’d definitely choose Making Money From Your App in the a.m., and Self-Replicating Awesomeness: Unmarketing your Web App to finish the day off. Plus, everyone who attends the workshops receives a courtesy Survival Kit DVD full of code and resources used that day! Sounds great! The fact that I’ve never attended any major web conference before, meeting like-minded people, and most likely networking, blows my mind! However, looking at the numbers for attending the FOWA conference and workshop would ring me up approx. $700! That doesn’t make any sense!

I could, however just take advantage of the student price which is $50 and to attend just the conference. There’s also a Barcamp meetup the same day the workshop takes place so that looks like an attractive alternative.

Future of Web Design - London - 17 to 18 April 2008

At first, I wasn’t really interested in going to FOWD since I’m not primary a designer. But taking a look at last year’s presentations and speaker line up really changed my perspective on that.

Ryan Singer from 37 Signals did a great presentation on web application usability, most notably was point #8 about errors, hilarious! It was very practical, to the point, and entertaining all at the same time. Not a whole lot of people can pull that off. Being a Web Design Conference, I guess at first, I just thought it was solely base on Photoshop, and Graphic Design, but I was completely wrong.

This year at FOWD, were looking at about 12 speakers! These guys & gals have either spoken at other popular events, or they have an amazing company that’s doing big things right now in the industry. A few speakers I’m looking forward to are Patrick McNeil from Design Meltdown, Andy Budd from Clearleft, John Hicks from Hickdesign, and Daniel Burka from Pownce. Can’t wait to hear what they have to say about their topics.

Watching my first Layer Tennis battle against Veerle and Cindy Li, I’d suspect battle of the sexes to be interesting.

What are your plans? Do you plan on attending FOWA, FOWD, or both!?