Nice. [via sciblog]

So the "official" program of day 1 at reboot8 is almost over. A day full of talks and presentations, and my first impression is that my personal re-reboot failed. Many of the presentations (and I have been mainly in the main room, where naturally the "big shots" are scheduled) where hard to follow, without any point or general statement to be made. Many other presentations stretch simple ideas that could be told in a few minutes to half an hour.

There are some more trials open, this evening and tomorrow. Probably I'll try the smaller rooms tomorrow.

Update: The evening talk of Ben Hammersley made up for much of the day. Really great, very much inspiring and lots of fun. As expected.

Not only here at reboot8 one constant quest, one drive, that unites the sphere of people here and elsewhere working with, building, using, thinking about or perusing Social Software is the quest for hyperlinks. Compare the way we display information nowadays to the web like it was 5 or 7 years ago. The wish and practice to have links relevant to the content (no matter whether they are placed within the content or at side or below) is a sort of uniting theme in many conversations, talks and writings. People think of linking this to that, creating MashUps that serve as Link Hub bringing together ressources around certain objects. To be more visible: list classifieds according to the geographical location. Organise bookmarks around concepts. And so on. We "enhance" every interface with many many links, in some cases links themselves are the main content.

To me this is really a slow but steady walk towards some sort of global information network, that allows to add any ressource and tie the ressource to an object. This is not limited, but certainly more prominent, in the online world. Services like ThingLink and efforts to "tag" the real world with RFID or other NFC technologies works on bridging the gap between real and virtual worlds. Matt Webb had an interesting talk this morning about a next generation "Web" Browser, that could cope with the fact, that browsing the web might soon include more than just webpages.

It seems like we are on a crusade in the name of the hyperlink.

If any of you read this post so far, then it is clear what conclusion I have to draw at this point. We we are working on the Semantic Web vision. Really. We do not explicitly, but implicitly. Yet hardly anybody thinks of "typing" links to apply some sort of semantics to the connections and the ressources / objects. But I'm sure that this is on its way. Just a matter of time.

At least I had to reboot several times this morning, as my really reliable Sony Vaio notebook, serving me well for over 2 years, made some hickups leading to continued rebooting. I blame Windows. As always, but whenever it comes to those machines, you can never be sure what or who is to blame.

Then it is also reboot8 (technorati) time. I'm not sure whether this year can anyhow be better than last year, because the surprise I felt being here last year was just to wonderful because my reboot7 experience happened accidentially.

probably it is generally a time to reboot, after some really intense days of work.