I recorded W3C President Tim Berners-Lee's press conference at this week's WWW2008 conference in Beijing.
I will write about the contents later. Click here for the audio and then click on the olive-colored play button.
Please forgive the mediocre sound quality; I record for my notes, and not primarily for broadcast. I came in a few seconds late as Berners-Lee was being introduced in alternating Chinese and English. The remainder of the press conference, including questions and answers, is in English.
Other posts from WWW2008 are here, and I'm Twittering here.
Update: I was having a glitch while linking to the podcast URL. It should work now. Or copy and paste http://gwbstr.podomatic.com/entry/2008-04-23T01_42_40-07_00 into your browser.
Other than highlighting Baidu Chief Scientist William Chang's statement that China doesn't need Wikipedia, here is a selection from the Twitterati (including me) on his presentation, and a concurrent one on the semantic web.
- web2asia: Robin Li of Baidu could not make it to his key note, Chief Scientist Dr. William Chang is taking over
- web2asia: facts on chinese internet: only 1/8 internet users earn usd 5000/year
- me: Baidu's William Chang: Only 1/8 of Chinese internet users earn $5,000/year.
- me: Chang: Half of Chinese users over 25, half under 25, according to CNNIC
- me: Chang: Wahaha drinks tie-in with Tencent's QQ and engage virtual currency.
- me: 很黄很暴力。(adult and violent content.) This will be solved along with copyright infringement, eventually -Chang at
- me: Baidu rep: China doesn't need Wikipedia
- me: Chang: "One could say Taobao defeated eBay in China by not charging a fee."
- web2asia: @gwbstr taobao promised not to charge for 3 years - this is the 3rd year. so the same thing will happen to them once baidu c2c gets big
- web2asia: chang now listing reasons for foreign companies failing in china, winners will b the ones that r willing to try new business models
- ullrich: W3C track, Open Your Data!: China Southeast university is strong in Semantic Web:SW search engine Falcons http://snurl.com/25ef3
- ullrich: APEX group from Shanghai Jiao Tong University also strong.
- web2asia: according to chang baidu will have significantly more than > 1000 engineers by end of 2008
- ullrich: Also strong in Semantic Web in China: KEG from Tsinghua University 2:44 PMullrich: Another strong Chinese Semantic Web research group: Dartgrid from Zhejiang University
A panel of social media experts believe that in 2020, social media will be far more pervasive, interlinked, and location-aware than they are now. Here are my comments as published on Twitter, with some comments following. (Reverse chronological order)
- David Shamma brings up what I've been wondering: What about security?
- Questioner answers vegetarian question by calling for show of hands. Old tech, hurrah!
- Marc Davis thinks in 2020, we'll have ambient data about stuff like who around us is vegetarian when we travel
- And David Shamma thinks it's more problematic: we need to manage different audiences.
- Marc Davis thinks it'd be a good idea to have all the stuff people here are typing centrally available...
- Lada Adamic - in 2020 you'll feel comfortable with a perfect stranger on your couch
- Marc Davis from Yahoo is talking about geotagging, predicts social media in 2020 will be heavily mobile.
This session is quite optimistic. David Shamma's attempt to bring up the risks of increasingly pervasive information networks such as security, privacy, and I'll add insanity, did not exactly take root. He's concerned too about the flood of information, something that gets you "zombied, or chickened, or whatever else." "Maybe we should call for people to prune their social networks a little bit, rather than grow them," he added.
Shamma also brings up an audience-side perception of a problem that I've encountered working in the nonprofit world: How do we make sure that we only send out event notifications to people who are still where they said they were at registration. Clearly, tying things into some locative status update would solve this, but I think the privacy implications there are very important.
I'll add more if there's more.
I'm now sitting in the opening keynote of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) here in Beijing, adjacent to the newly opened Olympic Stadium.
The first presentation is by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China. He's talking about "cloud computing," the general term for developing ways to turn our computer lives into something not tied to any single device.
So far, he's been outlining what cloud computing is, something that he admits is not news to anyone in this room full of industry and academic researchers, and highlighting all of Google's already deployed cloud components -- Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa, etc.
Now he's talking about the power of distributed computing for operations such as search that, as he said "are very hard to do with one computer, or even a very powerful computer." He added, "A cloud computer should have at its disposal a virtually infinite amount of disk, an infinite amount of processing power."
More to come... Follow me on Twitter at gwbstr. E-mail sinobyte@gwbstr.com if you're here and would like to get in touch!
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