This is the first WWW conference I have attended, and my overall impression was good. Interesting to notice was the integration of business and academic communities. Of course you had sessions which were more business or academic oriented, but overall, there was a link, a common ground, where both groups met, which is the will to make the Web work. It seems to me that business was forced into the Web, it was a question of competitive edge, pretty much like when business decided to invest in computers, they did not know exactly why, if it would be cost effective, but they had to. And now, for different reasons, both communities want its success; academics for the first time see a possibility for real-time, on-line, world-wide collaboration and information sharing; and business, once they decided to invest, now they are seeking opportunities to make a profit through the Web.
Through out the conference I noticed a few topics poping up more often than others, such as: it seems that the Web has lost its track as far as collaboration is concerned, it has become a big information repository and support for collaboration has been forgotten; servers scalability, when something goes right, are we really ready to cope with Zillions hits per day ? Do we have powerful enough computers do deal with the Web growth ?; Java, should we go forward and invest everything on Java development ? Is this the right way to go ?;safety of course, as business is more and more interested on the Web, safety becomes extremely important; copyrights, who owns what ? how can you control rights through out the world ?; search engines, they become more and more bias, user does not control the engine; authoring tools, new easy-to-use authoring tools are needed, the existing ones are still too restrictive and do not allow author to make use of full Web functionality .