The World Wide Web conference, now in its 26th year, hits Perth this week. The last time it visited Australian shores, in 1998 in Brisbane, a certain unknown couple of Stanford PhD students with an odd-sounded company name presented a paper showing how they were going to revolutionise the world of online search.
Yes, the Google guys, Larry and Sergey, delivered what is now believed to be one of the all-time classic papers about the web. The conference itself was initiated by such luminaries as Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the world wide web) and others a few years earlier.
19 years since it was in Brisbane, it has travelled around the world (next year it’s in Lyons, France, last year it was in Montreal, Canada) and moves into my home city this week, with 400 sessions being put on at a dozen different locations, mainly centred at the Convention Centre.
Looking at the agenda, it is geek heaven. What next big thing will be presented this week? There are topics ranging for the semantic web to AI to data visualisation to machine learning. There’s a session entitled ‘Is Tofu the new cheese of Asia?’ and ‘Web-based surveillance data to improve influenza forecasting in Italy’. Some pretty obscure stuff. I love it!
On Thursday I get to interview on stage 4 senior tech people from Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Snapchat. Can’t wait. 375 people are booked in for that event.
As we rush headlong into the future, it will be interesting to hear from these incredibly smart folk about what type of future we are hurtling towards. You get the feeling, like the 2 PhD guys in Brisbane in 1998, that the future will be moulded by some of the 2000 tech people descending on Perth this week.
