Meeting Tim Berners Lee, and other superstars
Added on Thursday 2 Oct 2003
I attended IT - The Universal Enabler conference a few weeks ago. The conference, at the Guildhall in London, was jointly hosted by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and the Lord Mayor of London. And speakers included government ministers, 'leading technologists' and 'senior figures from business'. I can only assume I must fit into one of one of those categories. :-)
One of the highlights for me was meeting Tim Berners Lee after he spoke at the conference. I didn't manage to get much of a conversation - because he was very much in demand - but I was struck by the fact that he is clearly still has massive enthusiasm for his 'invention' - i.e. the web. He is confident that the semantic web is the next step (rdf was mentioned more than a few times) - because the potential benefits are so huge.
Personally I don't doubt that there are massive benefits from RDF and the semantic web idea. But the problem, for me and probably for many people, is not that I can't understand the basic concept - let the machines do the processing - but that the details of how to implement it seems to be a bit on the difficult side.
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p>I also met those other superstars of the accessible web design world, David Sloan of the Digital Media Access Group and Nigel Peck of MIS Web Design.