Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 23:55:06 -0500 (EST)

I am this moment in one of the Internet access rooms at the WWW4 conference
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/Conferences/WWW4/ (obplug: net access provided
by http://www.bellcore.com/) for those of you who may not have noticed I was
gone. ;-)

The trip got off to a slow start, as NorthWurst cancelled my flight and moved
me to a later one.  Fortunately they called to inform me of the change, so
it actually meant I had more of a chance to get work done before I left.
I was glad I stayed Monday.

Waiting for a landing pattern, shuttle bus, and the like, I didn't get in at
the hotel until 9PM, at which time I rang Laura Craighead (who runs grimmy
amoung many other things at the Center for Network Information Discovery and
Retrieval) to ask if she wanted to get together.  We met down in the bar and
talked for an hour about work, mutual friends, and how to actually put a
database on the Web efficiently (Shane, I told her to call or email you with
Oracle questions).

Suddenly, some tall person was standing in front of me... a very old friend
who moved to Boston three years ago decided to just try to find me in the
conference hotel, and actually did so.  Amazing, considering the number of
people that are, here, 2K or so.  We all drank Coke (no rum in it, really)
until we got really silly from sugar and sleepiness, and had a wonderful time.

The conference seemed to get off to a slow start... Laura told me that the
Tutorials were overcrowded, and the Java one was completely useless, so I'm
glad I didn't pay the money for it.  Found someone who's working on a
project for Ford at Carnegie Mellon, and got some really valuable ideas from
him about solid content we can provide inside the company.  Also managed to
talk to Tim Berners-Lee for a little bit, and was completely impressed by his
presentation.  We can definitely use some of his ideas about the web as a not
only physically, but conceptually decentralized format, and want to learn
more.  Collaboration and object orientation are the order of the day, and
some valid bits from those panels.  I'm getting really excited by some of
the ideas of orienting our efforts towards the actual USERS, the engineers
that don't CARE what the filename is, but would be helped by saving a file
with a certain permanency.. how important is this, that tells me what to do
with it, whether to make backups, or send a copy to someone in email, or do
document retention... all that should be completely handled by the software
without bugging the user.  Talked to Paul from ACD, and he sounds as excited
as I am... I think the conference was worth the trip, at this point, if only
for the contacts and the motivation.

Had a good discussion with Davis Foulger of IBM Research at dinner, who is
working on Web Collaboration software.  He and Carnegie Mellon are looking
to hire, C++/Java and HTML/Oracle respectively.

Also got an offer to provide free stock ticker info for the Ford external
website, which I don't think I can use... a girl kept waving at me, and wanted
to talk to me because I was from Ford.  They'll also sell us that sort of
info for internal use.  Picked up lots of information for you from vendors,
Chris.

It's amazing... I think this is the first conference I've been to where
everything relates to my job.  I usually have to do considerably more picking
and choosing to get value out of a conference.  Was a little worried at first,
but it's turning out to be a great one.

-- Chad
@ Boston


Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995
Conference Overview

The two hottest topics of the conference: Security and Java. Everyone is
trying to jump on the bandwagon, write a Java book, vendors falling over
themselves to support it. Program items on either topic were standing room
only. 

Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, and Doug Englebart gave fantastic,
motivating speeches.  Dr. Englebart is famous for his 1968 multimedia
groupware presentation, a tape of which was shown at the conference. He is
credited with inventing the mouse, windowing systems, on-screen video
teleconferencing, and hypertext.

VRML is "quiet, small, and doesn't do anything", according to the experts. I
left the VRML BOF, and Bob Metcalfe fell asleep. The URN spec can also
be safely ignored as "not sufficient for clear, useful meaning". 

Sun Microsystems probably had the strongest corporate showing, and they
and Bellcore showed the most technical savvy. IBM and Microsoft had a
strong presences, but very little clue - however IBM ran a large hospitality
suite all week with only one goal: to hire Web experts. (I got three job
offers, two from IBM and one from Carnegie-Mellon)  Microsoft might as
well not have bothered, since their software crashed in one presentation,
and they got laughed at in others. Netscape failed to have any presence at
all, claiming to be small and overloaded. 

Did a tour of the MIT Media Labs Friday with Amy Bruckman (Mara from Trek).  
They're doing a lot of work on virtual learning, Lego Robots (Lego Logo is a
programming language they developed).  Ford funds their holography research,
they're about a year from producing a single-step holo-laser-printer.  They
also have a VR wall that analyzes what you're doing with a camera, and runs
a virtual dog that you can play with, and responds to you.

Amy runs two MOOs at MIT, MediaMOO, which I'm on every once in a blue
moon, for media researchers, and MOOse Crossing, which is for kids only.
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/people/asb/moose-crossing/

-- 
/* Chad Childers */  http://msen.com/~chad/