Lunch with Tim Berners-Lee

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

He continues: “I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.”

But is there enough big academic innovation going on, I ask, or do Silicon Valley wannabes now just dream of an Instagram-style fast $1bn from creating applications that make digital snaps look like their parents’ Polaroids and selling them to Facebook?

“I’m biased to think that there hasn’t been enough. I would have liked to have seen more development around open data,” he replies. Berners-Lee, who has spent years working on the “semantic web” of machine-processable data, is a director of the UK government’s new Open Data Institute, which aims to make more official data available and to train people how to use it to commercial and other ends.

The politics of telling the truth

AlJazeera:

Why has the mainstream US media failed to get past the rhetoric of political ads during this presidential campaign?

Political ads rarely tell the truth and in this year’s election campaign, facts have tended to matter less. This is where mainstream media should step up.

But so far, the US media have not shown the appetite or the stomach to get past the rhetoric and get to the truth. In this week’s News Divide, we look at the politics of telling the truth in a heated election campaign.