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5 October 2007
Future of Web Apps (FoWA)
Posted by Andrew Bate at October 5, 2007 07:48 AM
I've just got back to work after two great days down at "Future of Web Apps" (FoWA) in London. This year was heavily focussed around social networking sites and social content but there was a reasonable amount of discussion on startups and funding also.
There were some really interesting talks including; Steve Souders (Yahoo) talking about "High Performance Web Sites" and Daniel Burka talked about "Interpreting Feedback" after creating three startups in three years, including Digg and Pownce. I'll be expanding on most of the talks I went to on my own personal blog over the weekend and link back to them from Nodalities when they are done.
The semantic web didn't get much of a mention, unfortunately, and when it did it was in a bit of a negative light. John Resig, in the Q&A session after his talk on "The Future of Firefox (FF3) and JavaScript", dropped out a comment that "I don't think the semantic web web has as much legs as it used to" - I'm sure many at Talis would have something to say about that!
Eran Shir and Jon Aizen also talked about Dapper; allowing users to gather data from pretty much any web site on the web. They claimed that RDF+OWL "doesn't work" but did advocate Microformats to give semantic meaning to data on a web page. It may be harsh but, with my limited knowledge of what Dapper is doing, it does seem very much like data scraping rather than data sharing. This cropped up in the Q&A section and they did say that their mechanism for harvesting the data was fairly resilient but if the site owner made major structural changes then there would be fragility in the solution.
All in all, it was a very enjoyable event which was very well attended - now I just need to write up all the notes I took!
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Comments
Thanks for coming! :) Glad you enjoyed it.
Posted by: Ryan Carson at October 5, 2007 04:01 PM
