Speaker Utz Westermann from SEraja.

Current situation is a worldwide web of documents, hyperlinked together. Google and Yahoo provide the masses some structure. But times are changing. More multimedia is being pushed unto the previously text-only web. User-generated multimedia content, mobile content is also being shared on the web.

The original web was not meant for this sort of content. We are moving towards a worldwide multimedia web. The text indexes like Google and Yahoo may not be able to handle the multimedia aspect, so we see Yahoo TV and Google Images.

Web 2.0 services like Flickr and YouTube help the masses find multimedia.

A common thing we see today are blogs that use multiple online services to manage the different types of media. We need a new common theme for the web.

We think the common theme could be events. Events like New Year’s Day, a speech by a Minister. These events serve nicely as umbrellas for multimedia, mobile and traditional web document content. Events provide a new type of index for the diversity of media on the web.

SEraja, along with Meetup and Upcoming, aim to make events the center. SEraja has event details, description, tags of events. Along with the events the site aggregates content to do with the specific event. Even directions to the event (map) can be included. There is also community elements like comments because events are the social glue that hold people together.

The components of a worldwide event web will consist of a central index of events. The event web requires an event markup language. Spiders could crawl the web for event markup documents and submit them to the index. Information mining on these event markup documents could be in demand to produce peripheral information of the events. Event aggregators could also identify and group separate events as part of a larger event. Events can also have relationships with other events - whether some events spawned other events. There also needs some means of providing mobile users access to information on the event web as most events happen away from the computer.