Creator of World Wide Web Starts Blog
The fellow who created the World Wide Web has started his own blog. No, it isn’t Al Gore.*
World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog just in time for the 15th anniversary of his invention. In his first entry, Berners-Lee remarked on how the Web took off as a publishing medium rather than one in which visitors not only read but also contributed information. “WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship,” he wrote. That has changed lately with the growing popularity of blogs, which are online diaries that often let visitors submit comments, and wikis, which are sites in which visitors can add, change and even delete what they see.
Welcome aboard, Tim. Pretty soon, we’ll reach the day when reporters will quit feeling the need to tell us what a “blog” is.
Update: Slashdot had the story several days ago. They even had the decency to give us the URL of timbl’s blog.
Not to criticize a man who I’m sure is busy, but the blog started ten days ago and has precisely two entries, both of which are about starting the blog. He’ll need to pick up the pace a little to gain much readership.
The second post contains this observation, though, which is worth noting:
I just played my part. I built on the work of others — the Internet, invented 20 years before the web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext, a word coined by Ted Nelson for an idea of links which was already implemented in many non-networked systems. I just put these technologies together. And then, it all took off because of this amazing community of enthusiasts, who have done such incredible things with the technology, and are still advancing it in so many ways.
A good point but not one that diminishes his accomplishments. Seeing the possibilities of disparate pieces and integrating them into something much bigger and better is no small contribution. All of the great inventors stood on the shoulders of others.
*There’s a site called “Al Gore’s Blog” that, as best I can tell, isn’t.
Related:
Yes, some pine for the good old days of Archie and Gopher and FTP. They are not hitting on all cylinders.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
M1EK: While the “Gore invented the Internet” jibe is meant as a joke, the Snopes account isn’t particularly flattering to Gore.
The Internet goes back at least to DARPANET, which long preceded Gore’s tenure. I don’t deny that he was an enthusiast of the “Information Superhighway” or that he helped in a very small way to create the regulatory climate that pushed the WWW along. But his role was nonetheless negligible.
With a Slashdot link Tim already has more traffic after two posts than my weblog has had in its entire existence. Guess I’ll just have to invent something as cool as the web.