www2006 - Overall

[knutties]

www2006 was special in many ways.

• Met a lot of interesting and brilliant people
  
• Learnt a lot of new things
  
• Figured out what I should be doing for sometime to come
  
• Took a snap with the inventor of the World Wide Web

There was a lot of focus on Semantic Web and search related research.

Workshops/tutorials I attended

• Collaborative Web Tagging
• Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design
• Developers Tutorial: XForms for Web Applications
• Microformats, converting XHTML to vCards and vCalendars
• Semantic Wikipedia
• What Powers Web2.0 Mashups

Brian and Ryan showed some really cool microformat applications.  A demo is proof enough for one to understand how powerful semantic web documents, that can be processed by computer applications, are.  For starters, try this for a demo:

• Head to http://feeds.technorati.com/events/
  
• Give http://www.worldcupkickoff.com/ as input and get the hcalendar events
• Open/integrate the icalendar file into your calendar application
  

XForms by Steve Pemberton was eye opening.  Truly class stuff.  I did not know about XForms before.  Though it might take longer to get accepted and deployed, it is certainly the future of forms on the web.

Papers I attended

• Random Sampling from a Search Engine's Index
• A Web-based Kernel Function for Measuring the Similarity of Short Text Snippets
• Generating Query Substitutions
• CWS: A Comparative Web Search System

Being blissfully unaware of search engine technologies, I did not have a great time following the paper presentations.  But most of them had interesting observations that anyone following stuff on the net could relate to.

For me "the person" of the conference was Bebo White. He was the most lovable person.  The child-like enthusiasm he showed when he saw our poster was infectious.