Conferences. So much ill in the world is created by people needing to find something to say at conferences. Every year there is a cycle of them in every field including, would you believe it, computers geeks. Consider this line coming out of the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh:

...many researchers believe the current web has serious limitations. For example, although it is full of masses of data that is easily understandable to humans, most computers cannot make head nor tail of its content. The semantic web is touted as a possible solution to this. It is an attempt by researchers to bring meaning to the jumble of information that already currently exists on the web.

When up and running, it will suck in information - photographs, calendars, retail information, public records - and process it into a coherent picture of a person, place or thing. By referencing multiple sources of information, researchers believe it will behave more intelligently.

Even though I have thought incoherently about indexing the internet and thought key word tagging was going to take off, part of me is more practical and suspects it will never happen, that the folks involved with the internet are too short-sighted and self-interested to actually pull of a semantic web where each word or, say, just the noun is actually indexed, linked and corss referenced. Plus - who is going to do all the tagging of all the words to have the master system recognize them? The Finns? South-Asia? There ain't enough of us to spy on all of us despite what the Stasi thought.