Journal tags: xtech2006

XTech 2006 is over and with it, my excursion to Amsterdam.

All in all, it was a good conference. A lot of the subject matter was more techy than I’m used to, but even so, I found a lot to get inspired by. I probably got the most out of the “big picture” discussions rather than presentations of specific technology implementations.

Apart from my outburst during Paul Graham’s keynote, I didn’t do any liveblogging. Suw Charman, on the other hand, was typing like a demon. Be sure to check out her notes.

The stand-out speaker for me was Steven Pemberton of the W3C. He packed an incredible amount of food for thought into a succinct, eloquently delivered presentation. Come to think of it, a lot of the best stuff was delivered by W3C members. Dean Jackson gave a great report of some of the most exciting W3C activities, like the Web API Working Group, for instance.

I had the pleasure of chairing a double-whammy of road-tested presentations by Tom Coates and Thomas Vander Wal. I knew that their respective subject matters would gel well together but the pleasant surprise for me was the way that the preceding presentation by Paul Hammond set the scene perfectly for the topic of open data and Web Services. Clearly, a lot of thought went into the order of speakers and the flow of topics.

Stepping back from the individual presentations, some over-arching themes emerge:

• The case for declarative languages was strongly made. Steven Pemberton gave the sales pitch while the working example was delivered in an eye-opening presentation of Ajax delivered via XForms.

• Tim O’Reilly is right: data is the new Intel Inside. Right now, there’s a lot of excitement as to do with access to data via APIs but I think in the near future, we might see virtual nuclear war fought around control for people’s data (events, contacts, media, etc.). I don’t know who would win such a war but, based on Jeffrey McManus’s presentation, Yahoo really “gets it” when it comes to wooing developers. On the other hand, Jeff Barr showed that Amazon can come up APIs for services unlike any others.

• Standards, standards, standards. From the long-term vision of the W3C right down to microformats, it’s clear that there’s a real hunger for standardised, structured data.

Put all that together and you’ve got a pretty exciting ecosystem: Web Services as the delivery mechanism, standardised structures for the data formats and easy to use declarative languages handling the processing. Apart from that last step — which is a longer-term goal — that vision is a working reality today. Call it Web 2.0 if you like; it doesn’t really matter. The discussion has finally moved on from defining Web 2.0 to just getting on with it (much like the term “information architecture” before it). The tagline of XTech 2006 — Building Web 2.0 — was well chosen.

But the presentations were only one part of the conference. Just like every other geek gathering, the real value comes from meeting and hanging out with fellow web junkies who invariably turn out to be not only ludicrously smart but really, really nice people too. It helps that a city like Amsterdam is a great place to eat, drink and talk about matters nerdy and otherwise.

I’m sitting in a big room at XTech 2006 listening to Paul Graham talk about why there aren’t more start-ups in Europe. It’s essentially a Thatcherite screed about why businesses should be able to get away with doing anything they want and treat employees like slaves.

In comparing Europe to the US, Guru Graham points out that the US has a large domestic market. Fair point. The EU — designed to be one big domestic market — suffers, he feels, by the proliferation of languages. However, he also thinks that it won’t be long before Europe is all speaking one language — namely, his. In fact, he said

Even French and German will go the way of Luxembourgish and Irish — spoken only in kitchens and by eccentric nationalists.

What. A. Wanker.

Update: Just to clarify for the Reddit geeks, here’s some context. I’m from Ireland. I speak Irish, albeit not fluently. I’m calling Paul Graham a wanker because I feel personally insulted by his inflammatory comment about speakers of the Irish language. I’m not insulted by his opinions on start-ups or economics or language death — although I may happen to disagree with him. I’m responding as part of the demographic he insulted. If he just said the Irish language will die out, I wouldn’t have got upset. He crossed a line by insulting a group of people — a group that happened to include someone in the audience he was addressing — instead of simply arguing a point or stating an opinion. In short, he crossed the line from simply being opinionated to being a wanker.