www2004: Tim Berners-Lee
TBL, as always, gave the conference keynote talk. He focused on a couple of things: top-level domains/namespace, and the semantic web.
His basic point on top-level domains was that it's kind of broken. Basically, the domain namespace was designed as a tree, but it mostly works as a flat space. A global brand wants to be whatever.com, because when people thing web they think "www....com". So, eg, when .biz came along, instead of opening up a whole new realm of possible names, it just forced everyone who already owned a .com to buy the corresponding .biz, to avoid confusion. The new domain just devalued the existing domains. Instead of trying to organize the web by top-level domain, TBL says we should use metadata. Semantics in domain names is BAD (examples: .xxx and .mobi domains).
I'm not going to try and reproduce his basic points about the semantic web, because the argument has been made before: we should separate data from presentation, and make everything machine-readable and manipulable, so we can do great things with our business cards and calendars and FOAF data. And when we do, things will be awesome.
He also showed us some pictures of the "semantic web bus". It's a bus.
A question was asked, making the point that the semantic web as currently envisioned would tend to break the business model of many sites, since it strips out advertising. TBL suggested first that there is a lot of communication that is mutually beneficial, and that such people would use the semantic web, and second that perhaps new business models could be found. I think both of those things are true, but it misses the fact that a number of web businesses have something to contribute to communication, but can't do it altruistically. As just an example, Google is essential to most people's use of the web, but of course they have to sell advertising to stay in business. A semantic web that was limited to the non-profit part of the web would be deeply unsatisfying.