"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Monday, August 15, 2005

Web Founding Father "Sir" Tim Berners-Lee on the read/write web

BBC NEWS | Technology | Berners-Lee on the read/write web

Blogs fit the goal - open and easy

Important thinking from an important thinker !

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SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web
Born in London in 1955
Read physics at Queen's College, Oxford
Banned from using university PC for hacking
Built own computer with old TV, a Motorola microprocessor and soldering iron
Created web in late 1980s and early 1990s at Cern
Offered it free on the net
Founded World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994
Named by Time magazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century
Knighted in 2003
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"Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.

When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium."

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