Eighteenth W3C tackles the Web at 20

As we mourn the passing of the first great Internet company (into the maw of Larry Ellison), academics are gathering in Barcelona for the eighteenth World Wide Web Conference. Underway already but officially kicking off Wednesday, W3C will look both forward at where researchers believe the Web to be heading, and back at its 20-year history.

In the beginning, of course -- when Sun's sunsite.*.* efforts were supporting the first great explosion of Web creativity -- things were moving so fast they had to have W3C twice a year. (Your reporter was in attendance for the second, "Mosaic and the Web;" for a blast of real nostalgia, check out the best-of-the-Web awards given at the very first W3C, held five months previous.)

Things are a bit more orderly these days. In fact, such conferences are now presentable enough to be opened officially by royalty -- in this case, the Prince of Asturias, Felipe de Borbon y Grecia (crown prince of Spain), to be followed immediately by a keynote from our own Web royalty, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Sir Tim will look back on the past 20 years and speculate on the next 20.

Reasonable speculations: We're still going to be attempting to figure out the semantic Web; fretting about improving search, architecture and mining techniques; wondering if there's any privacy left (ooh, let's ask Ellison and Scott McNealy!); and figuring out how to monetize it all. Perhaps more ephemeral, but certainly promising to be lively this week, are conversations about how new media will affect old media, the use of mashups, the problem of credibility, and social networks.

Sounds great, but Barcelona at the last minute's just not feasible? Quit crying; your reporter's not going either. (Your reporter's not even going to RSA, though that security conference is being held in the rather more convenient though less desirable city of San Francisco.) Fortunately, papers and slides are being made available for your remotely located convenience. You could also resolve to do better next year, attending WWW2010 in glamorous... um, Raleigh, North Carolina.