Defenders of the Web

Tim Berners Lee goes postal on spam "So how are you going to stop the Semantic Web being poisoned?"

TBL, the GLB, replied:

Well, everybody who's building the semantic web pretty much that I know are building systems take data from lots of places, but take data with an awareness of where those places are. So for example, suppose you're getting Geotags and the OS runs a service, lots of people in this country might trust the OS to say this point has a church with a spire - other people might say it's a great church to go to, other people might say it's a heathen church to go to... those are the other sources of data...

There was no let up from the press:

"But that was the basis for Google, and Google got poisoned... "

Shadbolt and Hendler stepped in to shield Sir Tim, but he was seething at the impertinence:

I remember a conference, we were discussing the Semantic Web, and someone asked what do you think is the worst thing that can happen and all the pencils come out. I know you two have been asking about "Woargh - I know the one about... what about the bad guys? Won't we be phished" There's a temptation to give readers about all the terrible things out there OK, and all the ways the web can become less usable.

At this point, your reporter wanted to remind Sir Tim that of all the problems the web has, a hostile press is not one of them. In fact, you can't pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about how it's ushering in a New Age of Enlightenment. Time magazine gave "Person Of The Year" to every web user in America - or at least every one who looked at the mirror Time placed on its front cover.

He continued, cryptically:

Yes you'll find a bank that's less usable - ... I've never been phished.

So the Greatest Living Briton has never been phished, which is a relief. His answer to the Semantic Web didn't inspire much confidence for the rest of us: it would be used within the firewall, amongst trusted groups, "areas where one is much less worrying about the bad guys"."

RDF is DOOMed and other links

• The Future of the World Wide Web, testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, via Seth Ladd. Some commentry by Nate Anderson.
• Peak Code "At some point, half of the total lines of code for that platform will be written. The further a platform gets past its peak, the less attractive adding new features to it becomes since there is less and less potential return on investment due to the dwindling number of programs that could benefit from the improvements."
• REST Issues, Real and Imagined False Choice: “High” vs. “Low” REST, Red Herring: The Evils of POST, Red Herring: URI Design, Red Herring: Cookies Are Bad and False Choice: Machines vs. People. Sure to be answered in, "REST Books Galore (Sam Ruby also mentions the recent flood of REST books).
• RDFRoom DOOM rendering of FOAF via Semantic Desktop Workshop wrapup
• What engineering has in common with manufacturing and why it matters "Engineering – software engineering in our case – is remarkably like manufacturing, once we shift to view the unvalidated decision as the unit of internal inventory."
• It’s Not RDF versus Microformats "If your world is limited to business cards, social events and reviews then I can see where you might favour expression in HTML. Humans want to read those things too. But the world is bigger than social networking and there are other types of first-class data that people want to exchange with one another."
• Ruby on Rails IDE comparison. Favours NetBeans.
• The State of Swing Mentions one of the small Java 6 enhancements, SwingWorker.

The Myth of Web 2.0

All We Got Was Web 1.0, When Tim Berners-Lee Actually Gave Us Web 2.0 is a reference to an interview of Tim Berners-Lee, "Yes, the original vision of Berners-Lee is now apparently happening, so he's right in a sense there while glossing over the reality of the early Web. But though his vision was largely possible since the advent of the first forms-capable browser, at first we only got what we could call "Web 1.0"; simple Web sites that were largely read-only or at least would only take your credit card. The essential draw of mountains of valuable user generated content just wasn't there. And the millions of people with the skills and attitudes weren't there either. Even the techniques for making good emergent, self-organizing communities and two-way software were in their very infancy or were misunderstood. An example: How long did it take the lowly editable Web page (aka wikis) to be popular and widespread? Nearly a decade. The fact is, most of us know that innovation is all too likely to race ahead of where society is. I run into folks from Web 1.0 startups fairly often that bitterly complain about how they were building Web 2.0 software in 2000, but nobody came."

Tim also mentions those boring things like the Semantic Web, SPARQL and Enquire (the first browser which was an editor and browser).

Goggle vs Semantic Web

Google exec challenges Berners-Lee "At the end of the keynote, however, things took a different turn. Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig was the first to the microphone during the Q&A session, and he took the opportunity to raise a few points.

"What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first," Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user."

Related: Google Base -- summing up.