The talk at the reception here at the conference? The fact that the Honolulu Weekly has "blogging" as its cover story.

Wanna see the difference between a professional weblog and an amateur one?

Well, Dan Gillmor is paid to cover this conference. I'm not.

I went snorkeling. Dan stayed to cover the conference.

Enough said?

Edd Dumbill reports on the keynote at the conference. Thanks Dave for the link.

I'm back from snorkeling. Wow, what a beautiful day.

There's a group of folks who are talking here at the conference via IRC. Their notes are posted here.

One of the most interesting times during Berners-Lee's session was when he answered a question about "what will the Web look like in the future?"

He went on to say that it'll be much more interactive, that there'll be a Web of trust, mostly run by machines and then he advocated for building specs that'll allow the building of the next generation of the Web without royalties.

Basically he spent his hour making a case for keeping the Web built on open, stanards-based protocols, and free from control of any one company.

Well, that's the end of the keynote. I'm off to go surfing.

Just a note: Berners-Lee is hard to quote. He starts a thought, then goes off into another thought, and melds that into another thought.

For the past few minutes he's been trying to say Microsoft and Amazon sucks, without being quoted as having said that. Basically his point is that Royalties and Patents aren't good for the future of the Web. Now he's expanding on that point.

Weird. I can't read Dan Gillmor's page here, but I can see nearly every other Web site. Buzz, however, who is in Orlando Florida, can read his page and is telling me via IM what Dan is saying. Did I mention Dan is a few feet away in this room here? Don't ya love the Internet?

"Email stuff is not my domain," he says, but Berners-Lee says that not properly identifying yourself as the sender of the email is fraud and should be treated as such.

"Once you slip away from the rigorous way of putting these specifications together (implied, you get a mess)" Berners-Lee said. "We can't afford to allow people to reinterpret the layers."

"We have holes in this (how the browsers handle XML and HTML)."

Basically, to wrap up the first 15 minutes of his talk, Berners-Lee wants people to follow the WWW specs.

Now he's on an aside about SPAM. This should be interesting.

Ahh, Berners-Lee is talking about the role of specs in the Internet.

Dan Gillmor is weblogging from the conference too. I just saw him pop up on weblogs.com, although I can't see his weblog on the wireless network here. Weird.

Tim Berners-Lee notes:

Tim just got on stage, and is talking about how the Internet works. He's going somewhere, just don't know where.

I wonder if there are any other webloggers here. I know Dan Gillmor is here, it'll be interesting to see if any others pop up. Email me at robertscoble@hotmail.com if you find any.

The wireless network here is up and down. At least from the corner of the building I'm hanging out in.

Tim just got on stage.

Apple wired the entire conference hall with wireless. It's a good thing. Now conference planners need to get power strips for everyone. I stole one of the four available outlets at the back of the room.

More than 900 attendees. Thirty-six different countries represented. Tim Berners-Lee is coming on stage shortly.

Anytime you can hear the guy who really invented the Internet it's a good day. The sun outside is beckoning, though. So, I'll probably last only one session today.

I'm at the WWW conference in Honolulu. Tim Berners Lee will be on stage shortly. This is an academic conference. Hard core geek land. I had dinner with Dan Gillmor, tech editor at the San Jose Mercury News on Monday night, and we decided it's improbable that any news will come out of the conference, but it's not every day you get to hear Tim speak. More to come shortly.