Skillset Blog

Last week saw Tim Berners-Lee (that’s right, he who ‘made’ the Web) talk at NESTA on ‘The Future of the Web’. I managed to snaffle a ticket to this hugely oversubscribed event and was pleasantly surprised by this engaging and articulate man, who worked in the late 80s and early 90s with the boffins at CERN (the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, based underground in Switzerland) and is a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative.

I won’t go into massive detail - you can see the slides and webcast here and here - but I did want to sum up some insights gleaned for publishing, from Sir Tim and the two respondents: the leading thinker on innvoation and creativity Charlie Leadbetter, and Channel 4 Chief Executive Andy Duncan.

• The Semantic Web is going to break down the barriers of accessing content across different applications. We need to think about how this will impact on issues of convergence, digital rights, and content creation.
• We need to teach students in HE about new ways of interrogating, searching and collaborating at this level: the Web Science Research Inititative is central to this push, but what else can we do to ensure our graduates are capable of understanding and using this tool? Do they have the right levels of critical, analytical and creative thinking skills?
• The Open Data Movement that goes hand in hand with The Semantic Web will throw up issues for holders of content rights - whether authors, journalists or publishers - as they consider what to make freely available on the web. Do we have the right digital rights management skills in the industry?
• The vision of the Web is one of open collaboration, allowing people to use it to solve problems. What potential is there for publishing in this context? A lot, I would have thought, but we have to explore the potential rather than just take a protectionist stance with existing business models. We need to ensure that we have the right level of strategic vision and skill at the top of our industry to facilitate this.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 8:14 am and is filed under Interactive, Publishing, Skillset. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.