Nuno Jardim Nunes

News this week about the W3C conference quote Tim Berners-Lee about the role the semantic web is going to have in the future of the internet.

“I think there’s a chance actually that we can do better this time around,” said Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989.

“I think it’s also possible we mess that up, and the Web 2.0 becomes a big mess of rather unreliable stuff which you end up having to go through with Google,” he said.

I’m not commenting on this, but it surely contrasts my own view about the Web 2.0 being all about enhanced usability, something Don Norman advocated recently at the interactions magazine in his column People: the way I see it.

My guess is usability will drive the future of the internet, it’s all about the users stupid (I will not mail Tim Berners-Lee on this). Check Pedro Campo’s CanonSketch project about our vision about the future of software design tools and how they could support the future of the internet with stuff like Adobe flex.

A long time friend Mark van Harmelen is back in the field after a period in his homeland South Africa helping setup a research project and also being involved in the Manchester Framework Project. Don’t miss his online lecture about Oohci (I’m maintaining Mark’s trend of not using all-capitals for methods).

In his recent article Walter Mossberg discusses that Apple’s business model is taking an advantage over Microsoft’s component model. He goes on to say that Apple end-to-end business model is proving to be more suitable to the post-PC era. I guess that’s what Don Norman was thinking about when he wrote the invisible computer. Marketing, usability and convenience are dominating technology.