I was invited to speak at a UKSG event a couple of weeks ago (mentioned in a previous post) and have finally got around to posting about it now.

First off, here's my presentation:

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I went a little weird for this presentation - I wanted to do something a bit faster paced than the normal "slide / bullet, bullet, bullet : slide / bullet, bullet...." but probably not as ambitious as Simon Wardley or Dick Hardt. I think it went well - I've had a few people who were there contacting me and asking me to do the same presentation at their gaff, so it can't have been too bad...

In general I wanted to move away from the point I've been pressing for some time now ("web 2 - don't be scared") to something a bit more practical ("how to make the most of distributed services") - the main point being that it makes good sense to provide as well as consume distributed data. By doing so, a virtuous cycle is encouraged whereby more and more data becomes available to all.

There were some good speakers at the day and I made pages and pages of notes. I thought rather than publishing them as some kind of stream (and them meaning nothing to anyone..) instead I'd distill them down into three things that I felt kept coming up or were particularly pertinent:

1. Libraries and publishers are doing interesting things too

I think I gathered this from the reading I did before the event (see previous post linked above) but in particular I was impressed with the work that Talis are doing around their "Semantic Web Application Platform" and I fully intend to follow this up with an email or two and some more reading. Richard Wallis ("Technology Evangelist" - MY ALL TIME JOB TITLE...) from Talis did a good job of explaining the basics behind the distributed web.

Here's a couple more links I found when researching...

REST: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/59/ , PATrest: http://www.blyberg.net/downloads/patrest_1.1_overview.pdf , AADL keyword REST search: http://www.aadl.org/rest/search/keyword/dog , Mashing the library: http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/007391.html
 

2. Blogging is sometimes being used because it's easier, not because it is necessarily the right thing

I already had a half-formed notion of this fact (I think I picked it up from Andy from the Eduserv Foundation?) at a completely different event when he'd described that he uses variously hacked blogging platforms to deliver content on his local primary school website. At the time I'd thought this was a little weird but never got round to asking him about it. Again at the UKSG event there were two occasions when it was very clear that people were writing and distributing content using blogs because the other systems were too hard to use / jealously protected / horrible legacy systems.

In one sense this is great: blogging tools are used because they are easy to set up, easy to use, easy to keep fresh with content. But in another this is a disaster: it speaks volumes about the situation whereby people at institutions around the country are turning to blogging as a way of doing what their CMS and IT departments should be doing for them already.

(IT departments: note the first part of the paragraph above: EASY is the key here, not FULL FEATURED ) 

3. People still seem convinced that the Semantic Web = Web 3.0

Even taking into consideration Simon's hatred of pointless debates I'm still going to embark on this one, 'cos I think it's just not correct that "the next web" (whatever that may be) is going to be the semantic one. It's always risky doing any kind of future-looking but I'll put my neck on the line and continue to reinforce my view: the next web is going to be about ubiquity, immersion, "everyware". Susan Wu agrees with me. So that's ok.