Well, I thought that title would get some attention, but actually both are  tangentially  related.   Monday I was at the Web Science Trust event at the Royal Society in London (I’m writing this post from my hotel in Oslo, Norway, btw).    Here’s a link to a video provided by the Web Science Trust including many of the speakers from Monday’s event at the Royal Society.   As it so happened, I was caught in the footage though the Web Science Trust has not made it possible to embed the video, so I’m just providing an image  below, though you can see the movie by clicking on the link at the beginning of this paragraph.:

Yesterday’s event was pretty well attended and excellent – plus the video at the link above was very well produced, esp as it was produced overnight (usually, these types of videos take weeks before they are ready).  I am intrigued by the term “Web Science” which, as used by the Web Science Trust, is the study of the changes occurring on the Web and how we can make the Web better; Web Science includes scaling the Web, Net-Neutrality, Privacy, W3C Protocols for Web Browsers and HTML5, as well as many other things.  In fact, there are a few programs on Web Science being taught in the United States , and internationally, and I would like to get involved, esp though my book.

On this trip to London I happened (quite by accident – as if anything happens by accident) to stay at the hotel (Hype Park Hotel) that Jimi Hendrix lived for four months when he first arrived in London in 1966. I’m not a die hard Hendrix fan (though I know a few people who are) and decided to read about Hendrix and see if his room, #51 was available to stay in.   As it turns out, it was, on Monday night (my last night in London on this trip).  So I decided to stay in room #51.  Besides, it’s Jimi Marshall Hendrix whose room I was sleeping in Monday night – figured it would add to the experience, and it did.

I guess Jimi Hendrix stayed in other rooms such as 86 (though the front desk told me only about room 51 – not the same as “area 51″).

I was pretty young when Hendrix died, and was only vaguely aware of him in the early 70′s.   Now, I’m more interested in the story, now that I stayed in his original room, at a time when he was an unknown, just at the verge of the  meteoric rise of his career.   And, I took a video of room 51; here it is, below:

Well, leaving for Grimstad in a few hours where I’ll spend a few days before heading back to the United States.