Hi. I'm currently at LIFT09 in Geneva, and after the workshop I moderated yesterday, I could start enjoying ā if only the whole thing wouldn't be slightly disappointing overall.
Well, the workshop was about asking the conference's motto questions āWhere did the future go?ā with regard to that meta-utopia we call the Semantic Web. Slightly too technical at times, the discussion went pretty well indeed, the Café Method proved to be helpful once again. The participants, among them folks from Mozilla, DFKI, Swisscom, UBS etc. etc (and of course the Dreamlab guys), were pretty hard to stop discussing ā a good sign. In the discussion, the actual usefulness of many of the standards and ideas around in the Semantic Web space were heavily challenged, I'll have to reflect a bit for giving you a good summary.
The disappointment comes mainly from the impression of declining density, compared to the three LIFT conferences I attended before. More repetitions of topics previously covered, again a seemingly lower number of presentations, and an overall level that does not seem to rise. Maybe the future just went away, on holiday. Or maybe it's just me.
Instead of liveblogging or such, I'll just be mentioning a couple of pointers here over the next couple of days, all the content of LIFT is going to be online very soon indeed. A very nice presentation this morning was the one by David Rose of Ambient Devices showing us .. ambient devices (or rather āenchanted objectsā), actually working ones, like the 1-Pixel-Browser and so on.
After that Lee Bryant had 5 minutes, and he was good. Explained how the 20th century was basically and generally wrong, told us that trust is cheaper than control, told us to stick with a traditional mode of organizations: social networks. Network-based models are proven an aggregation and links beats coercion. Yes indeed.