Members Leo Sauermann

Mar 9 2010: the very sad thing is - in this case the speaker totally confused you. Microsoft has NOT the control over this. Its actually called Linked Open Data, and is standardized (like XML or HTML).

You can check out the open source implementations and standards, like www.dbpedia.org, www.freebase.com, http://nepomuk.kde.org for the desktop, or many other things in the direction of "open linked data". Don't believe that this is the only thing out there, it is not and that is a good thing, open standards and open data lead to more innovation and competition in this important market.

Mar 9 2010: the bad thing is: the idea is 11 years old, and was standardized by W3C then, and this guy is well aware of this and reuses the argumentation of Tim Berners-Lee and Hans Rosling, but behaves like he invented all this singlehandedly. I get a very very uneasy feeling for this.

Microsoft worked hard to give an impression of "we stick to standards" and what I see above is not what the corporate usually does. I don't like this talk because he is copying from others without quoting them. As if Microsoft invented this and has control over it - no, it hasn't, and this is a good thing.

Mar 9 2010: I don't like what I just saw. In my view, he intentionally does not quote previous work nor competitors nor standards to look clever. Gary Flake behaves like his company is not part of W3C who standardized the web of data in 1999. a shame.

He lies several times in the video, like saying "This has never been done on the web before".
Of course it was:

* Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Open Linked Data, 2009
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

* Hans Rosling, 2006
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

* Freebase.com

* dbpedia.org

The irony here is, that Tim Berners-Lee was attributing Hans Rosling in his talk - this is what you expect from a "Sir".

Rosling's technology was bought by Google, a shameful reason for not mentioning him.

"We need a web of data". This sentence is accredited to Tim Berners-Lee from 2001.

TED, you and microsoft fail for letting this guy dazzle you. What he sells as new is standardized 1999

May 18 2009: btw, I don't know if anyone posted it yet.
Timbl always puts the slides online:
http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl/

the song he starts "RAW DATA NOW" leaves room for improvement,
the semantic web people did a songcontest before, here is one remarkable result by Danny Ayers for an "open data" song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGcsGPgUTw