WebSci '09

Athens.
Tonight I'm at the opening session for WebSci '09, and we're looking forward to a keynote by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on the twentieth anniversary of his invention of the World Wide Web. The conference itself is going to be opened in the presence of none other than the president of Greece, though, so the place is swarming with Greek police (unsurprisingly, given the continuing low-level unrest in the country). In fact, there's a couple of secret service agents coming through right now, earpiece and all. His Excellency himself is running fashionably late.

In just over a week, I'm off to Europe for the first of a number of conference trips this year; as always, I'll try to blog my progress as I go. My first stop is the WebSci '09 conference, where I'm presenting a poster on the background to our blog mapping project (which has already produced papers at the AoIR and ISEA conferences last year, with more to come). Should be interesting, even if it's a lot more (computer and social) science-y than what I'd usually attend. And, they've got Tim Berners-Lee as a keynote speaker - no doubt in honour of yet another anniversary, and one which I didn't even mention in my post the other day: yes, the Web, too, first happened 20 years ago (or at least that's when Sir Tim first proposed his hypertext transfer protocol)!.