Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Web Monday in Jena - Aftermath


Yesterday evening, I visited the first Web Monday in Jena (see yesterday's Blog post). After all, it was a reall success. With almost 50 participants (ok...some 10 or 20 of them coming from synchronity alone) I had a large audience for my presentation on 'Semantic Web 2.0 Hype...'. After Lars welcomed all guests he briefly explained the idea of Web Monday and its relation to web 2.0 in general. Interesting thing to mention is that I became acquainted with Lars via openbc - although his office is only a few minutes from mine. He told me about Web Monday about a month ago and I volunteered to give the very first keynote speech -- although I first thought that I only had to give a 5-10 minutes spotlight talk (as it is the traditional way for Web Mondays).
My talk went rather smoothly but according to the echoes of our audience (see links blog references below) they seemed to like it.
For me the following discussion and socializing was even more interesting. Only to mention a few of the emerging topics:
  • web 2.0 and handicapped users -- a rather interesting and IMHO also important topic (application of specialized CSS, etc...)
  • user generated metadata beyond mere tagging (semantic wikipedia, ontology editors, etc...)
  • semantic web technology vs. information retrieval technology
  • ajax vs. modern programming paradigms and wasting resources (bandwidth)
  • applications of the web of trust
All in all the evening was some real success and we should be curious about the upcoming Web Mondays (ass proposed on October 16th and November 20th). So stay tuned!
Finally some echoes from other blogs: