I’ve just posted a piece on my thoughts about the first couple of days at last weeks XTech over at the BBC’s Internet blog.

As David Recordon of Six Apart noted in Wednesday morning’s plenary, open software and hardware have become hip and have given small groups of developers the chance to build interesting web apps – and, more importantly, the chance to get them adopted. This is a new wave of web companies which expose their data via APIs and consume others’ APIs. And what is interesting about these companies is that they are converging on common standards – in particular, OAuth and OpenID.”

more…

There was a lot on data portability and Semantic Web stuff (including our presentation on the Programme’s Ontology) both of which I’m really pleased to report are getting some practical adoption. And as with the Social Graph Foo Camp XMPP appears to be to an important emergent technology. I just hope it can scale.

Photo: 19th February 2005, by Paul Watson. Used under licence.