WWW@20 CERN 2009: vague but exiting2 min read

i was at the CERN in geneva yesterday, for this great event WWW@20, celebrating 20 years since the world wide web was invented. thanks to rss and my subscription to laurent haug’s blog, i got a ticket. it was fantastic to see tim berners-lee and the gang. TBL of course does speak hypertext, makes asides to asides, to let the sentence trail off and jump back onto the original thought. sometimes he even seems to make mouse clicking hand movements to accentuate his words. hard to follow but highly entertaining. and exiting. if vague. nooo! not at all vague. very semantic web. all that.

of course there is no need for me to blog this, others will do it better, already have done so, the main stream media has covered it, hell, even the BBC was there. however yesterday on my train ride back home, i read Blick am Abend, as you would, and i was glad to see, that it had a short report regarding the WWW@20 event. they had also asked some swiss “celebrities” what they thought on 20 years internet.

Here is what DJ Antoine had to say [translation mine]:

Since the internet exists, i work less. much time is lost to answer emails.

now this statement is ridiculous on so many levels, i don’t even know where to start. first of all, email is not the same as the world wide web, emails existed ages before. and second …

Dear DJ Antoine

let’s do a bit of math here. the world wide web has “existed” for 20 years. your age being 34. 34 minus 20 = 14. i hope you can follow so far. assuming at age 14 you still went to school, this means you never worked much. or have you?

well, anyway.

here are some of my photos (some also from the LHC)
the talks and panels can be watched online
and the bbc sums it all up nicely here: Web founder looks to big changes

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