Tim Berners-Lee Royal Society Webcast. And my previous post
Ok I'm live blogging this while I watch and listen from home. I unfortually have to say I missed almost one hour of it. The live stream was difficult to get half way through but I caught the last 10mins of Tim's talk and I am still listening to the questions.
Sam from Spiked asked a question about using semantic web for alternative reasons like making money. Interesting question and Tim made it clear rdf is like paper and can be molded into anything you like. There will be those who do just that, while others will use it for pro-human reasons.
Someone in the crowd asked if there something tim wished he could have changed in the last 14 years? He replied yes the slash slash. Great answer Tim. Not quite what I would have thought he would have said.
Interesting question asked about xlink came up too. Tim talked about the xlink in brief and touched on other areas of the w3c like svg, smil and x3d. Explaining how the semantic web was just one part of the w3c and the lecture had to be about something. Then he went back to rdf and touched on annonation – in the amaya browser. Suprising it would seem only a few knew what he was talking about it.
A good question came from the web. Should the w3c have been involved in streaming media standard? Tim makes it clear w3c dont impose standards, but maybe just maybe they should have been involved in the dissucssions at a earlier stage. The question also made reference to the fact you needed IE 5+ with Realplayer 8 to view the live stream. Cheeky but good point made.
Another cracking question came from the web.
Should there be unique ID's for web users to cut down on web fraud, etc? Tim had a good think about this one for a while, then replied with a sensible answer. For small communities yes, but not on a larger scale like nation. Everyone should be responsible for there words, but people have the right to be anonymous. He mentioned Slash dot's system as a balanced way of everyone being responsible but also allowing people to be anonymous.
Tim mentioned he will be involved in some talk about this issue somewhere in the uk very soon, it sounded like maybe within 2-3 weeks. Will have to check his blog for more details.
Then that was the end of the questions, which was a real shame. I'm hoping Fly on the wall will put up a clean version for vod very soon. I cant believe I missed almost a hour of the lecture. Shame on me, all i was doing was burning cds and watching the channel 4 news.
