21:14, Saturday 6 Apr., 2002 Link

The Web's Weaver Looks Forward: Tim Berners-Lee talks up the Semantic Web, with a little more detail about the future than he usually gives. And this is an especially interesting insight: a future www "where, in general, you won't be able to expect to get an answer in finite time". We shouldn't expect everything to happen in realtime, and browsers shouldn't necessarily be constructed around it. That sort of hints at the desktop becoming a workspace that is a portal to the internet, which can asynchronously receive and broadcast information, populate itself in the background, maybe alert you when questions have been answered. (All of which sounds a lot like Dave Winer's Radio Userland platform with more than a little Instant Outlining thrown in. Damn. Maybe that Winer chap is onto something.)

Topic merge: Dave is hinting that the Userland products already work with the unreleased Google API.