Highlights from TED: Tim Berners-Lee, Pattie Maes, Jacek Utko
We’re now more than halfway through the 2009 TED Conference, the thought-provoking gathering of innovative and multidisciplinary presenters. While some of the talks - on topics like reducing environmental impact in carpet tiles and addressing the crushing pressure creative people feel - fall outside of the GigaOM realm, a few have struck me as very relevant for this audience.
1. Tim Berners-Lee
Founder of the web Tim Berners-Lee spoke of the next grassroots communication movement he wants to start: linked data. Much in the way his development of the web stemmed out of the frustrations of brilliant people working in silos, he is frustrated that the data of the world is shut apart in offline databases.
Berners-Lee wants raw data to come online so that it can be related to each other and applied together for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s. He urged "raw data now," and an end to "hugging your data" - i.e. keeping it private - until you can make a beautiful web site for it.
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Lastly, I thought the design-oriented readers of GigaOM, as well as people interested in the future of news, might want to hear the story of Jacek Utko. Utko has made a business of redesigning newspapers in Eastern Europe. He started out his talk by making the case against newspapers: "Readers don’t want to read yesterday’s news, and advertisers follow them." Tweaks like making news more local, or more free, or more opinionated, are only staving off inevitable death, he said.
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