Science in the Triangle

It is somewhat hard to grok how much a Big Deal the WWW2010 conference is when it’s happening in one’s own backyard. After all, all I had to do was drop the kids at school a little earlier each morning and drive down to Raleigh, through the familiar downtown streets, park in a familiar parking lot, and enter a familiar convention center, just to immediately bump into familiar people - the ‘home team’ of people I have been seeing at blogger meetups, tweetups and other events for years, like Paul Jones, Ruby Sinreich, Fred Stutzman, Ryan Boyles, Wayne Sutton, Kim Ashley, Henry Copeland and others.

But it is a Big Deal. It is the ‘official’ conference of the World Wide Web. Yup, Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was there. I saw him, though I did not talk to him. I mean, what excuse could I come up with to approach him? Ask him to autograph my web browser?

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