The Talis contingent (sans Tom Heath, who is now wandering around China for a couple of weeks) returned to the UK from Beijing yesterday, and today begins the long job of documenting and following up on connections made during last week’s WWW2008 conference.
A few of my own impressions were captured on Friday in a conversation with the BBC World Service for their weekly programme, Digital Planet, which went out on air in various places around the world today. Have a listen to the podcast version, which I was pleasantly surprised to note adds up to about half of our recorded conversation in a number of segments during the show.
Beijing was well worth the trip, and we received plenty of validation for what we’re doing, as well as a lot of new ideas and contacts to help move things forward. More on some of that later, no doubt.
We took along some copies of the first issue of Nodalities Magazine, and they seemed well received; it’s been great to see the names of people I handed a copy to appearing on the subscription list for subsequent issues.
Anyone who’s watching our ‘Talisians‘ aggregator will have seen the flood of Talis-tagged photographs from the event and our trips over the weekend, as well as initial blog posts from myself, Nadeem Shabir and Rob Styles. Chris was clearly too busy talking to people to blog, and Tom was a victim of the Chinese firewall, but will no doubt have plenty to say upon his return. I’ve also been blogging on ZDNet, and have several almost-finished posts to publish there over the next couple of days.
Alongside the Linked Data on the Web workshop on Tuesday and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the Programme highlights for me were undoubtedly dipping in and out of the ‘Web in China‘ track, Carsten Ullrich’s paper on Friday and (although I moderated it, and am therefore biased) the Commercialising the Semantic Web panel in the final session. I must admit, though, to being vaguely disappointed that more papers didn’t leap out as (to me) excellent or noteworthy.
Corridor, bar and restaurant conversation did their usual job of enriching the good sessions yet further… and shedding light on topics and people that maybe didn’t come across as well as they should have in the formal proceedings… Beijing had the advantage - outside the conference hotels, at least - of cheap, plentiful food and beer to grease the wheels of conversation.
