Tim Berners-Lee's keynote at WWW2005

Tim Berners-Lee gave the opening keynote at WWW2005. He spoke about challenges in keeping the web usable in the face of pop-ups, spam, phishing, trojans and viruses. All the cool algorithms and services being developed are worthless if people are unwilling to use the web because it's annoying and can't be trusted. He challenged that these problems must be dealt with now, before we develop new ubiquitous services based on flawed trust models, and before we move entirely to using the web on mobile devices.

Friends of his family had computers so virus-ridden that after they bought software to remove all the nasty files and programs on their hard disks, nothing was left and the computers wouldn't boot. They bought new computers, with a (wise) change of operating system. Tim doesn't want trojans and viruses on his mobile.

Some random quotes:

• Unexpected re-use is the value of the web
• Firefox is a tremendous improvement on other browsers

He then launched theMobile Web Initiative.

Tutorial at WWW2005 Developer's Day

I'll be giving a tutorial on Building Dynamic Video Webs at the WWW2005 Developer's Day on May 14 in Chiba, Japan.

In Sydney next Tuesday evening (May 3), I'll be doing a dry-run at the Sydney PostgreSQL users group. Given it's at the James Squire Brewhouse, it probably won't be so dry at all :-) All welcome, so please come and enjoy the friendly, nerdy warmth of the JSBH. It'll also be my last booze-up before escaping to Japan and Europe for a little while, so let's party!

A little more about the tutorial:

This session shows you how to use familiar server-side scripting to build dynamic, interactive video webs. You can use CGI scripting and database backends to provide customization and personalization of video content on an unmodified web server. Using normal scripting languages, you can create hyperlinks into and out of video and manipulate tracks of timed XML metadata.

I'll be demonstrating scripting with Benno's pyannodex, an awesome set of python bindings for mucking around with Annodex media. We've used this together with a database backend for CMMLWiki, and that style of programming gives you all the flexibility of server-side scripting to produce custom video content instead of HTML.

We've got hundreds of hours of Annodex media content from LCA2005, so you can also come along to SydPUG and re-live some of the excitement of LCA! As Pia Waugh would say, Rock on!!!