Berners-Lee on the read/write web

[Rakesh 'Arky' Ambati]

Dear Friends,

Tim Berners-Lee is famous for his work on creating World Wide Web,but
the knight charming English gentlemen is man who brought standardisation
to the much of the technologies on chaotic Internet with his W3c
[http://www.w3c.org].

If his past work brought humans to use the Web better, his future work
on semantic web will make data better accessed by robots and expert
system.So,very soon I can create a computer program called My Man
Friday(MMF) who will search and tell all the traffic jams on the road am
just gonna talk or book me the train/bus/plane tickets. :o)


Here the latest interview of him on BBC.

Berners-Lee on the read/write web

In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen
years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to
his original idea about a read/write web.  

Mark Lawson  : Because of your invention, I was able to look up every
article written by or about you quickly and easily. But at the same
time, I was sent several unsolicited links to porn sites. I have to
accept that someone in Mexico may have stolen my identity and now be
using it. Is the latter absolutely worth paying for the former? 

Tim Berners-Lee  : That's an interesting question that you ask, as
though it's a yes or no answer. As though our choice is to turn off the
whole thing, or turn on the whole thing. I feel that the web should be
something, which basically doesn't try to coerce people into putting
particular sorts of things on it. 

I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it,
finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad
stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad
information out there, things that you don't like, are problems with
humanity. 

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it's
communicating over so many other different media. I think it's a more
complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal
medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports
the sort of society that we want to build on top of it. 
___________________________________________________________________________


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  
Tim Berners-Lee  
___________________________________________________________________________


ML  : When you think in terms of what it has allowed, what is the
achievement of the web? 

TBL  : It's a new medium, it's a universal medium and it's not itself a
medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It
allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows
people to exist in an information space which doesn't know geographical
boundaries. My hope is that it'll be very positive in bringing people
together around the planet, because it'll make communication between
different countries more possible. 

But on the other hand I see it as a substrate for humanity, I see it as
something on which humanity will do what humanity does and the questions
as to what we as individuals and we collectively do, are still just as
important and just as much as before, up to us. 

ML  : But do you feel responsible? You say humanity will do whatever it
does with it, do you feel responsible for what happens? 

TBL  : I do not feel responsible for everything that humanity does, no.
I suppose I feel a responsibility when people take on the web expecting
one thing and get something else, so yes I suppose that's partly why I'm
involved with the World Wide Web Consortium, and lots of other people
are trying to make it better. 

Towards a rewritable web  

ML  : I'm interested that at what sense you began to sense the
possibilities. You weren't thinking car rental, you weren't thinking
blogging, I assume. 

TBL  : 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. 
___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE 
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 

___________________________________________________________________________

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. 

ML  : Moving on to the consequences and the uses of the internet, the
first question that arises a lot is the quality, the reliability of the
information that is there. Now some people think that the internet has
led to this great empire of lies, of unreliability. You simply don't
know what the state of any of this information is. 

TBL  : When you say there are a lot of lies out there, if you go
randomly picking up pieces of paper in the street or leafing through
garbage at the garbage dump what are the chances you'll find something
reliable written on the paper that you find there? Very small. When you
go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do
you hope to find something of any of value? 

But when you use the web, you follow links and you should keep bookmarks
of the places where following links turns out to be a good idea. When
you go to a site and it gives you pointers to places that you find are
horrible or unreliable, then don't go there again. 

You see out there right now, for example, when you look at bloggers some
of them are very careful. A good blogger when he says that something's
happened will have a point to back, and there's a certain ethos within
the blogging community, you always point to your source, you point all
the way back to the original article. If you're looking at something and
you don't know where it comes from, if there's no pointer to the source,
you can ignore it. 

Powerful tool  

ML  : You must reflect though on the law of unintended consequences
because it wasn't remotely ever your intention when you started on this
that so much of the web would be given over to sexual exhibitionists
masturbating in their bedrooms with webcams. Do you ever have bad
moments about that? 

TBL  : Well I don't see that stuff. 


My goal for the web in 30 years is
to be the platform which has led to
the building of something very new
and special, which we can't imagine
now  
Tim Berners-Lee  
ML  : But you know it's there though? 

TBL  : Some people tell me. I suppose the question is to what extent the
people use it for things which should seriously concern us. For example,
are people using the web to get information about how to do illegal
things, whether it's to make explosives, how to kill people, poison
people, or whatever it is. So there's a certain amount of danger that
this tool can be used for bad purposes. It's a very powerful tool.

ML  : And you've never had a sleepless night over that? 

TBL  : No I haven't. I haven't had a sleepless night over it because I
suppose I'm so much more surrounded by the good things that people are
doing with it. There are lots of positive stories of people doing great
things, putting educational information out there for people in
developing countries and things, for example. There's a huge spirit of
goodness. Most of the people I meet who are developing the web are
focused on all those things. 

ML  : You have a convenient benchmark, because you have a daughter who
was born just as the web was beginning. Her stages of development are
the same as the web in years. So, when she is 30, say, what would you
want the web at 30 to be? 

TBL  : People often quite successfully compare the web with a growing
person, and it's certainly had its years of adolescence when it's been
trying to push the boundaries, see how far we can go, and I think some
of these things, with spam and phishing that we see at the moment are
examples of that. And people have been pushing backwards and forwards
about piracy, and I think a lot of those things will settle down. 

When it's 30, I expect it to be much more stable, something that people
don't talk about. Really when you talk about an article, you don't say,
"Oh, I'm going to write an article on paper!" The fact that we use pen
and paper is sort of rather understood. 

Similarly the web will be, hopefully, will be something which is sunk
into the background as an assumption. Now, if as technologists develop,
we've done our job well, the web will be this universal medium, which
will be very, very flexible. It won't, itself, have any preconceived
notions about what's built on top. 

One of the reasons that I want to keep it open like that, is partly
because I want humanity to have it as a clean slate. My goal for the web
in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of
something very new and special, which we can't imagine now.

ML  : Tim Berners-Lee, thank you very much. 

Mark Lawson's interview with Tim Berners-Lee is broadcast by Newsnight
on BBC Two, Tuesday 9 August at 2230 BST in the UK. 

You can also watch the programme from the Newsnight website, live and
on-demand for 24 hours after first broadcast.  


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/4132752.stm

Published: 2005/08/09 09:28:35 GMT

© BBC MMV

-- 
arky
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Blog [ http://arky.in ]
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