Slashdot Mirror
Tim Berners-Lee on Blogging And The Web
neiljt writes "The BBC2 is to air an interview by Marc Lawson with Tim Berners-Lee this evening, where TBL offers his thoughts on the Read/Write web. A transcript of the interview is available from BBC News." From the article: "I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on [the web], 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. "
The most important thing that can be done on the web is to remind people that just because you have a place to say something and something to say doesn't mean it needs to be said, shared, posted or heard. That's why I don't have a website on my domain. I don't have anything particularly unique to share with the world that isn't shared a hundred thousand times already on the internet. But people think that they're obligated to post every thought that ever crosses their mind and are so sure that the rest of the world gives a fuck.
Worse is that we have all of these social networking sites which encourage this sort of bland clique-esque behavior where nothing of any value is generated or contributed.
"Blogging" is the worst thing to ever hit the web. You used to have to put together your own site and have some idea of what you were doing and make some effort and you had to construct the way you were going to say things and present them and categorize them. Now you can just sign up for a free blogging account at google and start spouting off inane crap about your boring life and try to impress people with how cool and insightful you are.
Instead of having 5,000,000 individual "sites" (blogs) commenting on the same subject-of-the-day and expecting people to come to them, they should be sharing their comments (unless they're so utterly different and unique and special or whatever) in community forums like Slashdot. Can you imagine if, rather than reading a page under an article on slashdot to get everyone's thoughts on it - you had to visit each of the poster's websites, look for today's date and then read their thoughts on it?
Blogs segregate the internet. Every person - every individual - becomes their own outlet so the information is no longer aggregated except for third party systems Technorati or Digg. So now instead of having a lot of people participating in a few sites you have one site and source for each person and view. And those people participate in the other outlets and communities as much, because they expect people to come to them.
Really, I see Livejournal and its siblings as some of the most viral and insidious things to ever creep onto the web. Now it's just all about "I'm cool. I have deep thoughts. Look at this picture of my boobs. I hope someone asks me out so I can have an internet date".
Fucking pathetic.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks so. I know that if I were a writer, I'd be pissed as hell with people calling anybody who signs up for a blog a "writer". Kinda like calling anybody who can make a web page a "programmer". Big difference.
I don't respond to AC's.
I saw the interview, and it was full of crap. There was lots of questions about pornography, terrorism and asking him whether he can sleep at night - as if it's his fucking fault!
Usual shite interview when people who don't understand talk about anything remotely to do with computers.