twopointouch

Now that this Web 2.0 malarkey has become a full-time job, I’m getting out and about a bit more than was my wont. The next couple of weeks seems set to fry my brains completely. Do feel free to come and distract me with offers of beer if you’re coming along to any of these.

This week - The Future of Web Apps - excellent line up of speakers including the likes of Kevin Rose, Bradley Horowitz and Michael Arrington. Looks like it’s going to be a bit of a head-rush - ten speakers on each of the first two days, plus various networking sessions and a couple of panel debates.

Then on Thursday evening, it’s mashup*, where the assembled luminaries will be addressing the tangled topic of the semantic web. It’s being chaired by Sam Sethi of Vecosys. I’ve had various goes at trying to understand the semantic web on this blog over the last few months. The trouble normally comes at the point someone mentions the word ‘ontology’. From there, it tends to go downhill into XML, XML Schema, RDF, OWL, and SPARQL and a diagram that looks a bit like this (thanks, Wikipedia):

I’m also keen to understand how to separate the semantic crowd from the failed ‘meta tags‘ initiative. Why aren’t microformats and semantic mark-up equally susceptible to spammers? Hopefully, I’ll be able to tell you come Friday morning.

I have also promised to throw in a mention of Working Together 2 (disclosure: NMK is a partner). It’s not until March 8th but promises to be pretty interesting with speakers including Peter Kellner, George Osborne and Ewan McIntosh. Basically, the point of it is that a lot of government agencies aren’t very good at communicating. Trying to gain access to services via the Internet tends to require some pretty Byzantine manoeuvres on the part of us citizens, often involving 8pt type and 33 subsections. Bizarrely, though, we live in a country whose digital communication industries are second to none. Why not ermm… get them together? - hence the name.