Babies assigned a personal Web site at birth; companies that store your "digital assets" like a bank; search engines which find your perfect holiday with undreamt-of precision. These are some of the concepts on the agenda at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference.
From tomorrow, 1,200 delegates from 46 countries will be at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh.
The gathering of the world's foremost Webmasters will be headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton, who is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium and widely recognized as the father of the Web.
He will take the conference platform along with speakers whose diversity illustrates the all-embracing tentacles of his invention, including representatives of Amazon, the UK Film Council, Reuters, Yahoo, Nokia, Microsoft, Boeing, IBM and Walt Disney.
There will be sessions on creating a successful Web-based business, as entrepreneurs seek to exploit "the second dotcom boom" and hit on a big idea that will make them rich after the fashion of Google.
According to Berners-Lee's colleague at Southampton University, Wendy Hall, the executive director of the conference, the "next Google" will be the first business to seize opportunities offered by rapidly developing technology.
"I have a vision that in the future when a baby is born you'll get some sort of internet ID that is effectively your digital persona, and it will grow with you," Hall said.
"It will actually represent you in some way -- what you know, what you've done, your experiences. I guess you'd call it your URI [Uniform Resource Identity]," she said.
"This is the thing that always identifies you. Every time you do something on the Internet, it is effectively logged, building up this profile that is with you for your life. Then you have your life's record, which can include any legal documents or photographs or videos that you might have, that you can pass on to your children," Hall said.
Already anyone who goes online is adding to a "digital footprint" and will have to manage it increasingly carefully, Hall believes.
"People are beginning to become aware of how easy it is to have their identities stolen. You need to understand what information about yourself you are leaving digitally around the world," she said.
"I think of it like a bank. Our digital assets are as valuable to us as financial assets: they are going to be what defines us in the future. There are businesses that will grow up that will help you manage your digital identity," Hall said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS