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. "

Comments

What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[Ohmster]

Wish the interviewer had asked more punchy, specific questions that don't lead to general, global "we are the world" type of answers. I suppose Sir TBL did the he could under the circumstances. His best answer IMHO was to the question what would you want the web to be in thirty years: "When it's 30, I expect it to be much more stable, something that people don't talk about." Reading the interview got me thinking, what question would I have asked him? Mine would be the one I asked on my blog today "What is your most wished for Firefox feature?" * A good blogging question might have been "What's missing in the way blogging is implemented today?" * Answer to most wished for firefox feature at http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/08/s_4.html

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're never gonna convince bloggers that they are a bunch of mindless robots spewing out uninsightful or boring tidbits of their personality. It is just all a game for people to fit in the group.. In this case, blogging about something that everyone else is talking about makes you feel accepted, important, and mainstream. Who cares if no one reads your blog or leaves you comments? At least you feel good that YOU are being an "individual" by spewing out the same group values.

Anyway, I always have a good solution to these people. It always results in anger and laughter.

Take a look!. Obviously the most attention this self-important asstard will ever get. He should thank me.

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect to TBL (and seriously, this isn't meant to disparage him in any way), why should I be concerned with his answers to general questions about the web? Certainly, it might be interesting to know where he sees his invention going and the impact it's having, but that doesn't mean his answers are particularly insightful or relevant. TBL is a computer scientist who saw interesting possibilities in a new technique called hypertext. Certainly, his speculations and subsequent implementation changed the world. But he's no more qualified to comment on the social impact of the web than anyone else.

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[NickFortune]

I think the interesting thing lies not in Tim's answers, but in the tenor of the questions asked.

Mark Lawson seems to have been desperate to elicit some response along the lines of

The web is a terrible, terrible place! It was supposed to be all kittens and fluffy bunnies and instead all they use it for is identity theft and pornography! It wasn't meant to be like this!.

I could almost start formulating consipiracy theories about laying groundwork for increased censorship, except that, the tenor of the questions is nothing unusual for a newsnight interview.

Respect is due to Sir Tim for keeping his head and not rising to the bait.

Still, the political nature of the questions can be seen as reflecting the increasingly politicised nature of the web. I wonder if he's in for more of this sort of flack in the future.

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[eck011219]

I think I would have asked him whether he felt responsible for the bad things on the Web. I don't think the interviewer beat THAT dead horse enough.

Honestly, the Web has turned into its own viable organism, and I seem to hear a lot of people tracing back to Berners-Lee (or Al Gore, depending on who you believe) as the person responsible for dirty pictures on their son's computer (Mom, if you're reading this, I swear that picture of the lady and the horse just appeared on my screen).

I do wish someone who gets some time with someone like Tim Berners-Lee would ask MORE questions (or followup questions) on the "web in 30 years" philosophical/futurist front (after all, they have access to the mind of the person who started the ball rolling) and fewer repetitive questions about the lurid underbelly of humanity, which is really all that the "bad" sites are reflecting.

It just seems ironic and pointless to waste as many lines on that particular Web page asking the father of the Web whether he feels responsible for the other dirty Web pages out there.

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, a very telling question is the following:

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?

Now imagine someone would ask Graham Bell:

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 phone system would be given over to sexual exhibitionists masturbating in their bedrooms with phone sex. Do you ever have bad moments about that?

Wouldn't that just sound silly to everyone?

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[Pflipp]

Why should I be concerned with his answers to general questions about the web? Certainly, it might be interesting to know where he sees his invention going and the impact it's having, but that doesn't mean his answers are particularly insightful or relevant.

Yeah, but we could try, couldn't we?

At least it sells better than interviewing mr. Random Bum on the issue, and even then it might be that his ideas aren't particularly great just as well.

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[Uber Banker]

"...why should I be concerned with his answers to general questions about the web?... but that doesn't mean his answers are particularly insightful or relevant."

You answer your own question st stating "TBL is a computer scientist who saw interesting possibilities in a new technique called hypertext."

If anyone is going to comment on something being useful or not, then surely that's someone who has domonstrated an ability in the past to understand where a concept will/should lead, and what it is like to be at the fore-front of a technological tsunami.

You could say no one knows, and that the internet type system is so widely spread now that no single person would have a hope in understading where it would lead. You could say that someone is always biased to promote their own ideas/personal ideologies. I would agree with both of these critiques, but I would say, if one person has proved themself as a seminal, insightful, big picture personality, that really understands the web, then TBL is that person.

Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL?

[Savantissimo]

The advantage of HTML/HTTP was that it took existing inventions (open-link hypertext* and TCP/IP) and packaged them into a simple and easy-to-use form which was released as an open, non-commercial standard. The difficulty of the invention was very low and only slight originality was required. The tremendous effects of the web are another matter, and TBL does not deserve much credit there since his contribution was relatively minor compared to the difficulty and originality required to make the thousands of other needed bits of software work. Whatever his status as an innovator, as a choice for an interview, TBL is a bit dull. To me, he comes off as an academic bureaucrat who wouldn't ever say anything that could cause controversy.

$$$

*Guess who first implemented open-link hypertext and hypermedia? - the inventor that the crowd loves to hate, Mike Doyle of Eolas.
http://www.eolas.com/technology.html

MetaMAP: The First Open-Linking Hypermedia System
Method and apparatus for identifying features of an image on a video display
U.S. Patent 4,847,604, Filed in August, 1987, Issued July 11, 1989
Inventor: Michael D. Doyle

The MetaMAP system pioneered the use of clickable image maps in distributed hypermedia systems. It is also believed that the MetaMAP application was the first example of an "open-linking" hypermedia navigator, since it employed link references external to any single database. Previously, hypermedia systems were self-contained, representing all links between objects within a single monolithic database. A single small MetaMAP navigator application, on the other hand, could navigate through a potentially unending series of linked documents, no matter how large the collection of navigable documents might be. Later systems, such as the World Wide Web, similarly employed an open-linking architecture. The efficiencies that allowed the first MetaMAP application to provide instant object identification for tens of thousands of clickable objects in high resolution biomedical images, displayed on a 4.77MHz IBM PC, now enable the latest MetaMAP systems to deliver immensely-large multidimensional navigable image spaces for a variety of vertical applications. The patent also covers image space collision detection technology believed to be currently in widespread use throughout the computer game industry.

Maybe Mike Doyle would have been a better choice for an interview of a "seminal, insightful, big picture personality, that really understands the web". Like TBL, surely someone else would have come up with the same ideas before long - but he was there first. Doyle's downside relative to TBL is just that he tried to get paid for what he made instead of releasing it for all to use.

What the fuck is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck does this quote mean?

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.

We already have a medium...it's called the Internet...and every standard that runs over it, be it HTTP, FTP, IRC, etc.

Who the hell is this "we" shit? Who is to determine what gets built on it? Him? The enligtened Philosopher-Kings of ancient times?

I hate to say it, but Humanity has taken over, and it ain't going back to the good ol' days of Universities, Researchers, and the Military. Get over it.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[lambent]

Less interesting is the second half of the quote:

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.

This is a complete non-statement, of the sort that you'd be smacked for writing in an english class. The internet supports everything that is built on top of it. This includes the right society and the wrong society alike. This is like saying the earth has to support the sort of cities that we want to build on top of it.

Simply put, it does. It is incapable of doing anything else.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Who the hell is this "we" shit? Who is to determine what gets built on it? Him? The enligtened Philosopher-Kings of ancient times?

No shit. I'm sick of these people who are too self-important to just stick up a web page - no, they have to have their blog in the blogosphere or the blogoverse and if they actually recorded something they had to podcast it. And it's not enough just to do your own thing - no, we have to consider the implications it will have on our society, or God bless, humanity.

I have to agree with you, that quote was the biggest piece of drivel I've read in years. I'd amost think it was one big troll.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[kfg]

. . too self-important to just stick up a web page. . .

Could Tim just stick up a web page?

Nooooooooo! He was too self-important for that and had to go and stick up an entire World Wide Web.

The arrogant twit.

KFG

Re:What the fuck is this?

[mustafap]

>Who the hell is this "we" shit?

Thats the 'we' that actually build the infrastructure and design the protocols and applications, as apposed to the 'you', the lazy fucks who just blog all day and think it's relevant, important and meaning full.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[rthille]

I think the "'we' shit" (interesting choice of nouns there, given my interpretation of the 'we' part) is _humanity_. There are certain things that 'we' (at least the majority) have decided. Things like molesting children == bad. That may not extend to all human societies but I'd bet it goes for better than 95% of humanity. Of course the definitition of children varies quite a bit, from 21yo to first menstration.

Anyway, I think TBL was saying that just like when a group of people get together and try to create a government which will support their ideals, the population of the internet needs to come together to ensure that the internet supports their ideals.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[daniil]

Anyway, I think TBL was saying that just like when a group of people get together and try to create a government which will support their ideals, the population of the internet needs to come together to ensure that the internet supports their ideals.

What he says sounds like a Marxist utopia for me -- the people on the internet will come together and build a perfect society on top of it. But which part of the population of the internet should be the one to decide it? I find it hard to believe that all of the people on the net will ever agree on what the ideals are that the internet should support, or what "the sort of society that we want to build on top of it" would be like.

There is no "us". There's just some (power-hungry?) guy speaking in "our" name.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[AddressException]

There is no "us". There's just some (power-hungry?) guy speaking in "our" name.

That is logical nonsense. How can there be no "us", while there can be someone speaking in "our" name?

Re:What the fuck is this?

[Mr. Mikey]

I'll be sure to put a call in to Amnesty International, and see if they can do something about the bastard putting a gun to your head, and forcing you to read all these blogs you hate so much. It must be terrible not to be able to pick and choose which blogs you look at.

I'll also be sure to also mention the shackles you've been placed in... the ones keeping you from creating worthwhile content yourself, or walking your ass down to a university and taking some writing classes, and then creating some worthwhile content yourself.

Sir TBL produces 'drivel.' We've seen what he produces. What do you produce, and what should we call it? I believe I have some idea...

I'm not surprised that you disparage the idea that "we have to consider the implications it will have on our society, or God bless, humanity". Do you think such questions are unimportant? Do you think the future is pre-destined, or do "we" (you know, you and everyone else who isn't you) create the future? TBL is just asking you to stop, take a breath, and think about something other than you and your immediate gratification.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[mustafap]

Looking at your score will reveil that content is more important than presentation :o)

Re:What the fuck is this?

[Alsee]

Things like molesting children == bad.

Good point! Important tips for future internet development:
When you connect robotic arms to your computer you should
(1) Not leave them open to remote control by every sick fuck on the internet; and
(2) Not park your toddler unsupervised within reach of those robotic arms

-

Re:What the fuck is this?

[maxpublic]

the population of the internet needs to come together to ensure that the internet supports their ideals.

The internet is not, has never been, and (the gods willing) will never be a democracy. The vast majority of folks who use various internet services don't get to decide shit except for what the latest 'cool' trend is (e.g., blogging); they have no input or say whatsoever in any of the technical decisions that go into how the internet will function.

This is a *good* thing. Most of these people aren't even remotely competent enough to contribute to the discussion, much less have a say in the decision. They haven't earned the right to sit at the table, something which (fortunately) isn't granted to them the moment they turn 18.

Even divorcing the discussion from the technical details the internet *still* isn't a democracy. Since no one-world government exists there isn't one set of laws to bring us all into the darkness and bind us; hell, even national laws within national borders are a joke on the internet, primarily just a springboard for random police/FBI showmanship. Only a fool could say with a straight face that any national law passed in the last twenty years has served to substantially modify behavior on the internet.

As it stands the internet is a mix of a millions of little dictatorships, some larger than others, connected together through a bizarre form of organized non-government, the infrastructure of the whole thing being built upon the arcane deliberations of a very specific set of wizards. And so far as I can see it seems to be doing just fine - much better, in fact, than many government-dominated endeavors.

Max

Re:What the fuck is this?

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

That is logical nonsense.

Meaning: it's logically nonsense; or nonsense, but logical?

"Illogical" might have sufficed, and been clearer to boot.

Re:What the fuck is this?

[AddressException]

and been clearer to boot.
Just like your name would be clearer as -0.618!
Point well taken though.

the Read/Write web?

[yecrom2]

TBL offers his thoughts on the Read/Write web

"It's very hard to have the Read part of the Read/Write web without the Write part."

What in the heck is the Read/Write Web?

Re:the Read/Write web?

[Washizu]

"What in the heck is the Read/Write Web?"

You're posting on it.

Re:the Read/Write web?

[FLAGGR]

When Al Gore created the internet, it was chmod +r-w, but he soon saw the errors of his ways and chmod -r / +rw for great justice.

Re:the Read/Write web?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and then Bill Gates came along and contributed an a+x.

Re:the Read/Write web?

[wfberg]

Yeah, I figured it out from the context, too, but it's still clearly a neologism.

Unlike "World Wide Web" itself, which was in use as early as William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream;

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide web enough to wrap a fairy in:
And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes,
And make her full of hateful fantasies.

... or perhaps not.

Re:the Read/Write web?

[themishkin]

I know you're just joking and all, but Al Gore never claimed he "created" the internet. At least, not in the way most people think of the word "created". He was referring (loosely) to fostering the development of the internet. A more detailed summary of this myth can be found at snopes. linky: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp>

Re:the Read/Write web?

[mzwaterski]

Then slashdot came around and got rid of the necessity for read access.

Re:the Read/Write web?

[iamlucky13]

I took the initiative in creating the Internet. ~Al Gore (courtesy of snopes.com)

For your reference. I honestly don't think that sounds any more intelligent. In fact, the choice of business major lingo (took the initiative) almost makes it sound dumber.

Re:the Read/Write web?

[indifferent children]

chmod +r +r +r *

Dupes: you liked it the first time; what's the problem?

Re:the Read/Write web?

[elemental23]

I'd recommend reading TBL's book, Weaving the Web for a good answer to that question. It's actually quite interesting, where this interview really isn't.

Bad?

[dthrall]

"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 who is to decide good vs. bad? Parents should supervise/restrict their children's browsing habits, but I for one value sites such as http://www.erowid.org/ which is a site that contains information about drugs... There are plenty of "bad" websites out there that are labeled as "bad" because they offend people who are closed-minded...

Re:Bad?

[hal9000(jr)]

I interpreted that to mean that technologists have to find ways to you as an individual can say what is bad for you so that when you search for it, you don't get those results. It would be an interesting challenge to create a personally tailored, semi-auto-learning, smart filter.

Re:Bad?

[arkanoid.dk]

".. finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff"

This doesn't have to mean, that we should shut down the pages. TBL says "accidentally" which is the keyword here. Feel free to browse the page, but ending up on it without meaning to isn't necessarily a good idea. I will not suggest directly what ways to use, for as he said: they still need to be found, but something along the lines of smarter searchengines, that doesn't take you to "drugs" if you search for, say, john rug.

Re:Bad?

[tanguyr]

There are plenty of "bad" websites out there that are labeled as "bad" because they offend people who are closed-minded...

Who says that you need to resort to the opinions of others to decide what's good or bad? Why not train your browser (or search engine or whatever) like you train your spam filter so that it can build up a pretty good idea of what *you* think is bad?

Re:Bad?

[KillShill]

like web sites that suggest that the administrations of america, britan, australia, spain and italy tricked their citizens into invading a country based on forged evidence for reasons that have little to do with oil or terrorism (oil has gone way up in price...)

those naughty naughty web sites err "blogs". i'm just relieved that the mainstream media keeps relentlessly attacking the validity and credibility of blogs and the internet. if it weren't for the mainstream media's absolute backing of the administration, imagine the horrors we would be subject to?

stuff like schools not having to have 75 students per teacher, roads being kept up, hospitals well-funded, millions of new jobs being created. damn, i'm so glad the media holds onto the administration's word without question. i cannot imagine the consequences and lobbyists pay our congress enough to do the worrying for us.

keep us safe please. those damn ay-rabs are gonna get us. never mind that the hijackers passports survived and the world trade centers didn't or that the air force didn't respond until half an hour after the planes that hit the towers, when normally they respond within seconds. or that the esteemable "president" and his secret service knew that he was safe in the school reading about goats, which was announced days earlier to the public, deemed that they shouldn't evacuate lest a plane should hit.

Re:Bad?

[jo42]

Nothing like a good goatse link to spice up the olde intestinal fortitude...

Re:Bad?

[Moofie]

"stuff like schools not having to have 75 students per teacher, roads being kept up, hospitals well-funded, millions of new jobs being created."

Huh?

I'm no fan of the current administration, but if you think that picking a different president is all that's necessary to solve these problems, you need another civics class.

Re:Bad?

[Tobias Lobster]

And who is to decide good vs. bad?

Surely it wouldn't matter if something is categorised as 'bad'. From the original quote:

protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff [my emphasis]

If you want to find something that has been classed as 'bad' then turn off whatever safety feature is there to stop you finding it by accident.

The junk is hard to avoid

[genericacct]

I highly agree that sorting past what we don't want to find is a challenge still. We all know spam is a war, but we have better tools and systems now than ever before. I just wish I could search google/froogle without finding a ton of messageboard, blog, and ebay "spam". I think search technology has a lot left to do.

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[Seumas]

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.

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[rackhamh]

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?
You have a very narrow view of blogs. There are plenty of blogs out there that have active communities. Here's one:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

At the time of this posting, there are 130 comments on the most recent blog entry. The only thing that's missing is threading, but the technology exists for that:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie =UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-32,GGLG:en&q=blog+thread ed+comments

See, for many people blogs aren't just about throwing their comments into the web and hoping that somebody likes them -- it's about actually creating an environment for discussion of thoughts that are pressing to them, rather than letting others dictate the terms of the discussion.

For some people, that just means asking their families to read their blogs, and for others it's an attempt to create an actual "community". Either way, the potential for real meaningful interaction certainly does exist in blogs. What TBL is talking about is filtering through the large number of amateur, careless, incomplete and otherwise failed blogs to locate those that have that potential.

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[Mapultoid]

Do you know how many times I have heard this sad old trope? Yes websites where people write their own content are so annoying! I mean, imagine a news site where the readers submitted stories, and people commented on them! Imagine all the bland, meaningless crap those people would be writing in the comments. Things that have been said dozens of times before. The humanity! And imagine that such a website developed into a community, maybe a gasp! social network. OH MY GOD. That would be SO terrible.

There is nothing new under the sun, my friend - yet you keep speaking, in order to criticize all the other people who decide that THEY want to keep speaking. You are a silly, silly person.

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[rackhamh]

I do not find all blogs to be stupid, redundant, or crowdist. Although Slashdot is suffering from quite alot of groupthink, thanks to the moderation system for the most part, there is a chance for people to participate in quality discussions

Huh? First you say that Slashdot engages in groupthink, and then you say that the moderation system allows for quality discussions? It is the group itself that applies the moderation, which only enhances groupthink.

Let's draw a distinction here: there are vibrant, active communities, and there are well-balanced communities.

There's no point in worrying about the latter until we can at least identify the former...

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[Seumas]

First thing: We need to stop calling everything a "blog". If it's one person's viewpoints, it's a blog. If it's a lot of people participating together, it's a blog. If it's a listing of updated events, it's a blog. Whatever happened to things just being a website?!

Second thing: You pointed out a couple of sites out of how many hundreds of millions of personal sites? For every one valuable thriving community site that stands above the crowd and represents the rare cream, I can show you half a million live journals, a hundred thousand blogger journals and a few hundred thousand personal traditional websites.

Blogs remove the difficulty of entry, yet again. Imagine how much more crappy television would be (unthinkable, I know) if the barrier for entry was "you have to have a pulse and a camera" and any drivel you could think of putting together would automatically be accepted, produced and broadcast?!

And I don't buy it when people excuse their personal blog by saying "oh, it's just for me and my family" or "it's just for me and my friends". First - if that's true, then why is it open to the public? And regardless of that, why can't you pick up the phone and talk to your friends and family? I mean, presuming they aren't in the same city you are.

Nobody said every blog was shit. Just the enormous majority. Maybe five nines. And that just goes to prove the entire point both myself (and TBL) have offered. There is too much crap. And, worse, the crap is ENCOURAGED. After all, do you think Google or Live Journal cares if your blog has any real content? No. They just care that you're another account and that you'll link to some friends and you'll generate more eyeballs amongst yourselves.

Something about "grey goo" fits in somewhere here.

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[rackhamh]

First thing: We need to stop calling everything a "blog". If it's one person's viewpoints, it's a blog. If it's a lot of people participating together, it's a blog. If it's a listing of updated events, it's a blog. Whatever happened to things just being a website?!

That's like saying everything's a "car", when there are sedans, coupes, minivans, SUVs, etc. The range of sites that fall under the category "blog" is a deficiency in vocabulary, but calling everything a "website" is far worse.

Second thing: You pointed out a couple of sites out of how many hundreds of millions of personal sites? For every one valuable thriving community site that stands above the crowd and represents the rare cream, I can show you half a million live journals, a hundred thousand blogger journals and a few hundred thousand personal traditional websites.

Exactly. Welcome to the topic.

Blogs remove the difficulty of entry, yet again. Imagine how much more crappy television would be (unthinkable, I know) if the barrier for entry was "you have to have a pulse and a camera" and any drivel you could think of putting together would automatically be accepted, produced and broadcast?!

No, because "accepted" doesn't apply. If there were unlimited, free channels available on cable, then we could have a similar situation. Then we could have a discussion about how to identify the stations that are worthwhile. And you know what? That would be pretty cool, and I'm sure there would be plenty of worthwhile sites created. But again, the question of filtering the content is important.

And I don't buy it when people excuse their personal blog by saying "oh, it's just for me and my family" or "it's just for me and my friends". First - if that's true, then why is it open to the public? And regardless of that, why can't you pick up the phone and talk to your friends and family? I mean, presuming they aren't in the same city you are.

Have you ever tried reading a URL over a phone? Blogs allow us to share things over the web that simply aren't that easy with other media. And some blogs do have the ability to restrict access. The fact that some people haven't elected to use those restrictions reflects ignorance or laziness more than ego -- I think you've made quite an incorrect assumption in that regard.

Nobody said every blog was shit. Just the enormous majority. Maybe five nines. And that just goes to prove the entire point both myself (and TBL) have offered. There is too much crap. And, worse, the crap is ENCOURAGED. After all, do you think Google or Live Journal cares if your blog has any real content? No. They just care that you're another account and that you'll link to some friends and you'll generate more eyeballs amongst yourselves.

Wow! Companies encourage people to use their products! I'm shocked!

Yes, there a lot of blogs. Most are not of interest to me. That's why we need intelligent searching and filtering mechanisms. That should be our focus, not complaining that people are talking about things we don't care about (after all, they will always continue to do so, through whichever means are available).

Something about "grey goo" fits in somewhere here.

Well, I'm glad some people are using their grey goo to talk about solutions rather than problems...

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[MikeTwo]

I wish I had mod points... parent has a good analysis.

The world has always contained too much information - computers and the internet have just allowed us to finally have access to it. We've reached a critical level of receiving information (that was always there, just not accessible), and from here on out society needs to work on filtering/categorizing/organizing/etc this information. There are too many books to read, movies to watch, music to listen to, and quack theories to debunk in a single lifetime. There always was, and there always will be. No possible suppression tactic, save global totalitarianism, will ever work.

What the world needs now...is filter, sweet filter.

Re:The junk is hard to avoid

[mdwh2]

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.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

And please - do you really want a return to the days of when everyone had to have their homepage, which was often badly designed, lacking any real content, and full of stupid animgifs? Whatever you may think of blogs, at least it lets me read what people have to say without putting up with awful design; I can read it without having to visit every blog manually (eg, RSS or LiveJournal); and the content I see is limited to information which is recent, rather than homepages which often got years out of date.

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.

That might apply to standalone blogs, but it doesn't apply to places like LiveJournal (which you nonetheless include in your critisms), since they allow comments and have a community just as much as Slashdot (probably far bigger, in fact).

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?

You obviously haven't used LiveJournal, or heard of RSS.

What you say applies to the bad old days of "homepages", and standalone blogs without RSS.

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.

No, blogs have done the complete opposite. Now I can sit and read information from a variety of sources, be it my friends' lives, news items or discussion points. Before, I had to go to a million different websites, or email people individually, and so on.

What you mean "we"?

[hcg50a]

We have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

"We" are doing that, certainly, but "we" don't all agree on what sort of society "we" want to build on top of it.

Re:What you mean "we"?

[daniil]

What you mean "we"?

Obviously, he's talking in the name of his vast armies of zombie bloggers.

Re:What you mean "we"?

[SheeEttin]

"GK: You're starting to refer to yourself in the plural, I see. TR (MR. ROGERS): Yes, we are. And we shall continue to do so. Won't we? Away!" --Garrison Keillor and Tim Russell, Celebrity Classics: The Six-Minute Macbeth, A Prairie Home Companion

Re:What you mean "we"?

[vinohradska]

Societies grow organically. You can build foundations, but you can never build the society itself. Look to history for a long line of distopian nightmares that arose from someone's desire to build a society.

In other words

[csoto]

Tim wants more good pr0n!

Re:In other words

[trezor]

Hey! This ain't a troll. Did the mods wake up with decaffed coffee or what?

I mean... A story about blogs and the "red/write-web"? Now that is a troll if I ever saw one. But this? Just simple humour among simple people.

Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[Sierpinski]

But it sounds like basically what he's saying is that he'd like to see more websites that don't suck, and less sites that do.

Brilliant! ;)

(Un)Fortunately we have a little thing called free speech, which can be a double-edged sword (hence the 'Un'). I can find information 99.99% of the time that I'm looking for, but I also get shoved head-first sometimes into piles and piles of unwanted banners, popups, spam, spyware, etc.

More good, less suck. I think we should run with that!

Re:Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[Kelson]

Reminds me of an old (by today's standards) joke:

The best thing about the web is that it allows anyone to publish.
The worst thing about the web is that it allows anyone to publish.

Re:Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[Poromenos1]

I think that the web is not as bad as we think it is. Using Opera, I haven't seen an unwanted popup in ages (besides, about the only sites that have popups any more are the crappy geocities ones, I think), and I have had gmail for a year and seen haven't seen a bit of spam, although my hotmail account gets a couple of messages per week (and my email addresses are available on the web for spiders to find). It's much better than, say, 3 years ago, when every site had popups with more colours than pixels.

Re:Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[aengblom]

Did you just call the man who invented the "world wide web" a troll?

His comments weren't particularly enlightening, but they were made in reaction to a question that basically asked "Are the good things on the internet worth the bad things?" His answer was a rejection of that question as a yes or no. Basically, all he's saying, is don't look to get rid of the thing, put your effort on improving it, like you would the rest of society.

Re:Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[aengblom]

ME: "Did you just call the man who invented the "world wide web" a troll?"

YOU: "Don't mean for this to be a troll..."

Oh, you didn't. I just can't read. I'm pretty sure this is the crap TBL was talking about. Perhaps, to improve things, Slashdot should have a delete feature.

Re:Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[clean_stoner]

I also get shoved head-first sometimes into piles and piles of unwanted banners, popups, spam, spyware, etc.

Funny, I never see any popups or spyware, and only very, very rarely do I see banners... oh yeah, I use Firefox.

Re:Don't mean for this to be a troll...

[Khelder]

I'm reminded of another old quote (originally inspired by Usenet):

"It doesn't take all kinds, we just have all kinds."

I think the author was Gene Spafford, but I'm not sure.

Who and who?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"Marc Lawson with Tim Berners-Lee"

Who and who?

Re:Who and who?

[Jeff Hornby]

Marc Lawson seems to be a famous UK journalist (he works for the BBC)

Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. Note that's the WWW, not the internet. TBL's main contribution was HTTP and HTML. It's come a long way since then but it's still all based on the same technologies.

Re:Who and who?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Thanks - I had no idea. I've been online for about 13 years now...odd that I didn't know that name.

Re:Who and who?

[deathy_epl ccs]

Yeah... That's it! You're access rights are revoked, turn in your /. account at the door on your way out and enjoy the rest of your internet-free life. ;-)

Amen!

[nantoka]

"..we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it..." amen to that! our problems as a race are not technological, they are existential, and I am really glad to see that the web is finally starting to reflect that. its as if the search-stream gods are finally comfortable with virtuality. finally it's okay just to put an idea on the web, and expect that if its good enough, that idea can stand on its own. from ideapark.org-- "we have been so busy building up the Internet with pseudo-edifices in the grand style of Olde Commerce--virtual banks, virtual universities, virtual shopping malls--that we have completely forgotten to ask ourselves whether that musty old economic model is really worth replicating in the Dream Land that is the Internet. It's time for us to wake up, and quit taking the math test over and over again."

Humanity

[rackhamh]

This is humanity which is communicating over the web

Not exactly the most reassuring thing I've read all week... but it's only Tuesday, so maybe there's still hope.

He likes "blogs"

[GillBates0]

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.

Interesting perspective there coming from the creator of the WWW itself. Especially so because of the contrary opinion that I and a number of techie people (on and off Slashdot) hold - about "blogs" merely being the ancient idea of personal webpages that have been around for 2 decades, and which is being recycled/marketed as a hep "in" idea in the past few years.

I've always thought of "blogs" being a overhyped concept that the PHBs (recall "corporate blogs") and Joe Sixpack are discovering as a kewl thing you can do with teh Intarweb.

And here comes Sir TBL himself and claims that blogs are closer to what he imagined the original WWW to be. And when he puts it like that, I sorta agree with him - I'd rather have people more personal content on there (not talking about the typical immature blog-kiddie's OMG I'm so cool) rather than have it turn into a marketing/services too used mostly for providing business services (car rentals, flight reservations).

If blogs are what make using the WWW easier, more interesting and useful, then I'm willing to drop the whole (Blog = Overhyped Personal Webpage) argument.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[garcia]

If blogs are what make using the WWW easier, more interesting and useful, then I'm willing to drop the whole (Blog = Overhyped Personal Webpage) argument.

Blogs are there and they serve some purpose but I'm not sure it makes the web any easier or useful. Depending on what you are seeing it certainly might make it more intersting...

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Mr. Underbridge]

I'd rather have people more personal content on there (not talking about the typical immature blog-kiddie's OMG I'm so cool)

Um...what else is there? Endless crappy vacation pictures?

Re:He likes "blogs"

[blamanj]

It's not the idea that he can go out and read what some random teenager has posted on a blog that he likes, it's the idea that the web is becoming more "write friendly."

For a while, you had to host your own server or be proficient in markup to get stuff onto the web, and things were looking very corporate.

What TBL originally had in mind was a read/write medium, and he's happy to see that the ability to write is catching up.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[garcia]

Um...what else is there? Endless crappy vacation pictures?

I have more on my website than just "endless crappy vacation pictures". Granted, most people won't give a shit about 90% of what's on there but I do get plenty of hits to my website looking for local restaurants and activities.

Maybe if someone else had been doing it I wouldn't have had to suffer through Divinci's Pizza (see below) or the horrifying expensive experience at the Rockin' Ribfest in St. Paul.

Who knows though -- maybe I'd have a completely different opinion on the subject all together.

Just today, I received an e-mail from someone reading my site that said, "I might try Divinci's Pizza just to see if it's really as bad as you say it is. BTW, enjoyed reading about it."

If anything, maybe I brought someone to a restaurant that will end up being their favorite just because my review gave it some attention.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[an_mo]

If you read his autobiography, you'll see that what he had in mind for a browser is to always have an editor attached that would seamlessly allow people to contribute to the web (something he mentioned in the interview as well). He coded his browser to do that, he didn't want people to have to learn HTML in order to contribute. Other browser coders (including and especially NCSA Mosaic's, then Netscape's Andreessen) didn't see that as a crucial feature.

Blogs and wikis implement that idea server-side, that's what he likes about them; it's not about the content.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Mr. Underbridge]

I have more on my website than just "endless crappy vacation pictures". Granted, most people won't give a shit about 90% of what's on there but I do get plenty of hits to my website looking for local restaurants and activities.

I'll give you credit, you put more work into your page than most people. If the service there is any indication, you just helped the reader screw himself though.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Jeff DeMaagd]

If blogs are what make using the WWW easier, more interesting and useful, then I'm willing to drop the whole (Blog = Overhyped Personal Webpage) argument.

I think you missed the point. To demonstrate exactly what you are missing, I now forward the whole calculators == overhyped abacus idea.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[jericho4.0]

The www was being used in ~92, maybe he's refering to .plan files? I agree with the idea though, as long as we've had computer to computer comunications, we've been obsessing over personal spaces.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[coflow]

I find it interesting that the blog is the focus of this concept of "the read-write web", when I think wiki is a much more powerful tool and a better example of collaboration than a blog.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[BishonenAngstMagnet]

But Geocities (first free webhost that I can think of) was made in 1994. That made the web writable for anyone (and sadly, everyone). Many blogs found on the internet today aren't much better than the Geocities sites of the late 90's.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Dr. Sp0ng]

I find it incredible that nobody here grasps why blogs are so important. It's not the individual blog that's important - it's the "blogosphere" (although I'm not a huge fan of that term). It's the immense collection of interlinking sites, with built-in mechanisms for notifying each other of links (trackback/pingback) and of notifying central services of updates (pings, RSS/Atom).

It allows for incredible things to be done - real-time monitoring of the entire internet for anybody writing anything on a particular topic or keyword being one example. It's no longer necessary to have a search provider (i.e. Google) crawl the web periodically and only be able to get updates on the current state of the net weekly or monthly or whatever. As soon as a post is written on a blog on, say, the shuttle landing, services such as Technorati notice it, and you can be notified of this post the next time your aggregator updates your "shuttle" search feed .

So it's not the individual blog that's interesting - most of them (like most of everything) are crap. It's the aggregated state of all the blogs that's interesting. It's being able to tell what's on millions of people's minds at this very instant. It makes the web a much more real-time medium.

But TBL is right - what makes all this work is the fact that blogging software is simple enough for somebody with little or no knowledge of HTML to be able to post and be an equal participant in the "blogosphere."

Re:He likes "blogs"

[groomed]

It's being able to tell what's on millions of people's minds at this very instant.

I don't know why that's so incredibly important. Furthermore this is to a large degree a derivate of whatever CNN/AP/MTV, and now, ImportantBlog, decides is important. So to know what's on "millions of people's minds" I might just as well read a paper.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[zippthorne]

Most caluculators have MORE features than an abacus. and none of them as far as I am aware use an actual abacus as the central processor.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[isorox]

What TBL originally had in mind was a read/write medium, and he's happy to see that the ability to write is catching up.

I've always considered wiki's to be closer to this collaberative medium.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think that's reading too much into it.

What I wanted to communicate is that a weblog is an easier and faster way to make and change a personal web page. Rather than worrying about coding and markup, or using a program to generate the files (lots of steps) and then upload it (a few steps), weblogs make it a lot easier for most people to post new information or change it, just click "post" or "edit" and type. Some of them automatically generate RSS feeds, which is a big pain to do manually.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[javaxman]

I've always thought of "blogs" being a overhyped concept that the PHBs (recall "corporate blogs") and Joe Sixpack are discovering as a kewl thing you can do with teh Intarweb.

Blogs ( personal, anyone-does-it web pages in log form or of any kind ) are and always were generally cool things ( even if they're not all good ). Tools that make HTML easy to author are and always were generally cool things ( even if they're not all good ).

So it's not Blogs per se that I dislike; it's this new, over-hyped word for something that's been around for a long, long time. Now, 'easy-to-use web log creation software', that's something that's relatively new, and I think that's a great thing, even if I detest the market-speak of the terms "blog" and "podcast". Yea, disliking the term is silly, it's language... but I find it over-hyped and not necessary, and I'm a cold, over-analytical bastard that way. Probably, I'm just jealous that I didn't make up a name for log-format personal web pages first. But really, why not just call it a page? Do you need another word?

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Dr. Sp0ng]

I don't know why that's so incredibly important.

Are you serious? It creates a real-time view of the current consciousness of the entire human population (well, an enormous section of it, anyway)! That's something that has never been possible in the history of mankind.

Furthermore this is to a large degree a derivate of whatever CNN/AP/MTV, and now, ImportantBlog, decides is important.

Not really. Ideas have an amazing tendency to spread through the blogosphere, from a single post, to the point where they're being talked about everywhere. This includes things that the mainstream media, or popular websites, or whatever, never made a mention of until it was already all over the blogosphere (many examples from last fall's presidential election come to mind).

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Apotsy]

So ... you hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person. Then a techno-celebrity said it was okay to like them, so you changed your mind.

Think about it: do either of the positions described above seem at all rational to you? Really, you sound like a techno-elitist with no opinion of his own.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[doom]

Dr. Sp0ng wrote:

I don't know why that's so incredibly important.

Are you serious? It creates a real-time view of the current consciousness of the entire human population (well, an enormous section of it, anyway)! That's something that has never been possible in the history of mankind.

But it's not immediately obvious that it's good for much of anything.

I could easily be missing something here, but I have the strong impression that the whole "blog" phenomenon has a lot of promise, but isn't anywhere near delivering as of yet... there's lots of open-ended chatter, lots of spewing of this and that, and a hell of a lot of people retreating into little corners and pretending that they've gone some place. There's very little in the direction of tools to get all of this activity to really add up to something.

I haven't seen a blog yet that I think is more important that the wikipedia.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[GillBates0]

No, it's not that I hate blogs per se. If you reread my post, you'll notice that I disliked the hype/buzz surrounding this relatively old technology which has been around atleast since 1992. I don't dislike personal webpages and infact maintain a few of my own. It's the buzzwordiness and hype surrounding it that I dislike.

Your statement: "So ... you hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person." is a fallacious argument. I never said I "hated" blogs (to use the strong term you use in your quote) at all, and moreover I *never* said I hated them "because they were so accessible to common people". The statement that:
1. I dislike the hype surrounding blogs and
2. Blogs are accessible to common people
taken together do *not* imply your conclusion that "I hated blogs because they were so easily accessible by the common person".

Second, it's not like I didn't have an opinion of my own - I described my opinion in the paragraph above. But I don't mind changing my opinion if I encounter one that is more adequately justifiable, especially when put forth by a person who I consider more knowledgeable than my own (TBL is certainly one of the persons I hold in high regard, and to me he's more of a scholar than a "techno celebrity" as you put it) and I'm willing to accept an opposing opinion contrary to mine if the my opponent in debate is able to justify it satisfactorily to convince me otherwise.

To sum it up and answer your question - both these positions (TBL's and my original one) sound equally rational to me and are more of a personal opinion - I don't even agree completely with using the term "rational" to describe a human opinion. Hope this clarifies my stand.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[keytoe]

The most valuable things about having friends is not that you all have similar opinions. It is instead that you know them well enough to interpret their opinions accurately with respect to your own world view. The better I know somebody, the more useful their opinions become to me - even if I never agree with them.

I don't get any of that with television, but I sure do with the handful of RSS feeds I keep tabs on.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Kopretinka]

I got a blog when I decided that updating my homepage was just plain stupid - nobody would be re-checking and it didn't show what's the new bits and what's been there forever.

So I also view blogs as personal homepages, and there may be hype about them, but they seem they are here to stay, whereas the original personal homepages really didn't make all that much sense in the way they were hyped so many years ago.

But blogs will stay alongside with the business - that's the nice thing about the web - everything can be there, the worhless stuff gets ignored.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[Crumplecorn]

Are you serious? It creates a real-time view of the current consciousness of the entire human population (well, an enormous section of it, anyway)! That's something that has never been possible in the history of mankind.

This is a joke/troll, right?
I mean, let's lay aside the arrogance of saying the 'entire human population' (or even most of it) are in the moronosphere when people are starving to death, getting bombed by imperialist first world countries, or just engaging in local wars that are centuries old, along with all the other generic world events that generate charities and protest marches.
Lets instead the take the first world. Narrow it down to the people who are involved in the Internet even enough to be part of the moronosphere. That knocks out a lot, more in some places than others.
Now narrow them down to a group of people who firstly think they have something important to say, but are either too stupid (or should I say moronic to be consistent?) or do not value their oh-so-important contribution enough to actually put work into it, and jump dump it into the moronosphere instead, thinking someone cares. Of these, we have a decent view of their current conciousness. A big empty echo chamber.

Blogs are in the same category as newsgroups and IRC channels which are the homes of 1337 d00dz, crackers, and various other breeds of low-lifes. But they can be credited with damaging the Internet more than othe groups.

Re:He likes "blogs"

[elemental23]

I haven't seen a blog yet that I think is more important that the wikipedia.

And you likely never will, because you're comparing two fundamentally different things.

Wikis in general, and Wikipedia specifically, are collaborative. They have large numbers of people contributing content to them, where the typical blog has between one and maybe half a dozen or so, depending on the type of site it's on. It's only when you look at blogging as a whole (I refuse to use the word "blogosphere" here) that the real value comes out.

Um, yeah...

[TopSpin]

How about getting CSS 2.1 recommended sometime this decade? It's only been three years. At least Microsoft wouldn't be able to use the document status as a cop-out for not attempting to implement it. I'd rather you stick to promoting interoperability instead of social engineering; people won't turn out the way you want anyhow.

Excuse me?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff

What kind of 'bad stuff' is he talking about? Child porn? Regular porn? Photos of mangled dead bodies? Opposing political views? Goatse?

Be specific.

Ay, there's the rub!

[TheAwfulTruth]

"...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."

And just who is "we" then?

And just what "sort" of society "we" want to build?

Dictators throughout history have been trying to dictate society for thousands of years and still no one has got it right" (If there is such a thing).

As far as the internet goes, we either leave it open and let it reflect all that is glorious and all that is reprehensible about the human condition, or we form our "perfect", lowest common denominator, society that is such a narrow slice of humanity that it becomes completely useless to all.

OR

We do what we've been doing and leave it open but try to police the very worst of it as best we can. Realizing of course that there is no universal truths as to what is "worst" vs "tolerable" vs "necessary".

This is a hard thing to do and it should be hard and it should require continuous debate. But when I hear words like "the sort of society that we want to build" I get a cold chill and I don't even have to know or care who is saying them.

Re:Ay, there's the rub!

[TheAwfulTruth]

Hmm, please no "redundant" mods, 10 other people posted the exact same thing in the same time it took me to write this post!

Re:Ay, there's the rub!

[Jeff Hornby]

How about a society without spam? or a society without virii and worms? A society without spyware?

Why are people assuming the worst about everything TBL says? It's not like he has a history of totalitarianism.

Re:Ay, there's the rub!

[Jherek Carnelian]

And just who is "we" then?

Any group of like-minded people.

And just what "sort" of society "we" want to build?

Whatever sort they want it to be.

The net, more than anything in meatspace, enables specific communities to develop as connected to, or as indepent of, any other community on the net.

They can range from the extremely insular to the extremely open and they can all do it however they want without having to dictate how other communities ought to organize and behave.

You want to be a car-freak? Fine, lots of places on the net. You want to be ferrari snob, fine there is a place for you too. You want to be hong-kong rom-com movie fanatic? Lots of places for you too. Whatever floats your boat, you can find or build a group of like-minded people on the net and you don't have to step on anyone else's group to do so.

Re:Ay, there's the rub!

[maxpublic]

and you don't have to step on anyone else's group to do so.

Not only that, you *can't* step on anyone else's group because you lack the power to do so. It's probably the defining positive quality of the sytem.

Max

There is a difference...

[LexNaturalis]

between having the ability to write, and having the ability to be READ. I'd love to say that my website is as popular as Slashdot, but I can't. Actually, if it were as popular as slashdot, my bandwidth would be gone in a day (so please no slashdottings!!). I think I have something useful to say, and most people who make websites (but obviously not all) think they have something useful and valuable to say. The problem is that most people live in anonymity in real life and online. Google has helped create an online prom in which prom king and prom queen are chosen based on "popularity" and not necessarily any specific quality about them. It's the same with websites... some of the most intellectually stimulating and factually sound websites I've found do not show up anywhere near the top of a Google search relating to those sites. I don't have any answers on how to fix this problem (I perceive it as a problem, anyway), but I do think something needs to be done. Oftentimes the least reliable sources are touted as truth.

Re:There is a difference...

[Poromenos1]

It's all a matter of taste. Maybe the sites you find stimulating are not as stimulating to other people. My page (plug) is the absolute best page on the entire internet, but it doesn't have all that many visitors.

Re:There is a difference...

[Hosiah]

some of the most intellectually stimulating and factually sound websites I've found do not show up anywhere near the top of a Google search

True, of course. But I notice the first channel I flip to when I channel-surf is rarely the show I want to watch. Often, I must scrutinize the guide and select the one show which best fits my current viewing needs. 99.99999% of everthing on television is boring, stupid garbage, but I'll put up with the garbage before I'll have somebody making up my mind for me what to watch.

Ditto search engines. Personally, I vary my searches between multiple search engines. What one ignores, the other will feature. But God forbid anybody should come along with my best interests at heart and rearrange the web according to their ideal. Cuz you know who'd fight to get that responsibility? That's right, the Prom King and Queen, and it's nothing but Walmart and the Mall and Top Ten and Brittany Spears viruses after that!

relative bad stuff

[handy_vandal]

What kind of 'bad stuff' is he talking about? Child porn? Regular porn? Photos of mangled dead bodies? Opposing political views? Goatse?

I think he's calling for each of us to be specific about our own dislikes, and then arranging not to encounter that stuff. There's no one standard for indecency: one man's erotica is another woman's porn, etc.

-kgj

Re:Parent is NOT flamebait!

[Seumas]

I think a big part of the problem is that people are constantly told that their viewpoint matters. What they have to say MUST be said and that everyone is obligated to hear it. So you wind up with tens of millions of teenagers and young adults with nothing insightful to contribute, contributing anyway.

Seriously, what reason is there to create a blog or a website unless you have some seriously valuable content? Just because you have an opinion or a thought doesn't mean you need a site to claim it on. People use their blogs and sites like a portal to their "intellect". A way to fluff their ego and draw friends (which is pathetic since they're just other people online spread around the world that shouldn't matter to you). But they're all just dying for kudos to be posted to their blog posts by the throngs of masses that care so much about the conditions of a breakup or divorce or hard day at college.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is just shut up. Or, in this case, not have a blog or a website. Just like some people choose not to pollute the world with more crappy children by not having any, others should choose not to pollute the internet by not running a stupid blog. I made the choice not to bother running any website that has anything to do with my viewpoints or thoughts on the world. Those are mine and while I'll share them personally in face to face situations as appropriate to discussions, I'm not going to throw them out as some "valuable" point of reference on the internet. Doing so is just the hight in deluded self-importance.

Really, 99.9999% of blogs and personal websites seem like the equivalent of the guy or girl hanging out in a group who can just never shut up, always have to be the center of attention and feel that every thought that enters their brain has to be expressed and discussed and acknowledged by their friends. It's just sad and pathetic and polluted.

And it isn't that people shouldn't be able to share their thoughts or ideas. But that's what Slashdot and Usenet and other outlets are for. If you have thoughts on tech news, discuss them on Slashdot. If you have thoughts on politics, share them on a political site. Just please stop fucking creating a new blog or site for every person with every view in the world. That defeats the entire purpose of the internet. Rather than bringing people together to discuss things, it turns into one big sloshy pit where there are billions of completely separated and often unheard voices. It makes every person and their thoughts an island and nobody is going to go out surfing from island to island to island when they could just participate in the bigger conversation with more mindful groups on the mainland.

Re:The road to sollipsism?

[tanguyr]

Not hearing/seeing anything you don't disagree with because you have put blinders on your searches might lead to the kind of world described in "Fareignheight 411" (that's 411 not 911) By Ray Bradbury.

Yeah, but in Fahrenheit 451 the firemen went around burning other people's books, not just their own.

If you're solipsistic in your reading, regardless on the medium, you do so in order to become a "contented consumer" and it costs you your humanity.

And that is a tragedy - one which we see all around us because the vast majority of people do go through life with blinders on. But insisting that they must open their eyes is as wrong as them insisting that we must be fitted for their blinders and even more hopeless. After all, none is as blind as the man who will not see.

Bad stuff = not actually related

[spamfiltre]

The "bad stuff" on the internet would be all of those search results that aren't actually related to what I'm searching for.

TBL is unrealistic in this regard, as the "bad stuff" can only go away only when I have a trained AI doing my searches for me, and automatically filtering out the results that aren't pr0n.

Re:Maddox on blogging idiots

[nantoka]

brains need to crap, too. Im serious.

Re:Lame

[Poromenos1]

He talks about that in his book, he says that he didn't make the web to make money, and that he doesn't mind that people made much money off it. At least that's what I remember, it's been a while since I read it. It's called Weaving the Web, I think.

Free speech?

[poptones]

Where the hell do you live? Surely it ain't the US, where posting pictures of your 12 year old in his or her swimsuit (much less their birthday suit) will get you knocked up by the local constabulary... and surely not the UK where you can't even advocate societal changes others find offensive without getting arrested... and not even the "wild wild west" of russia - where you actually can do that other stuff... just so long as you don't step on Putin's toes.

Free speech? If you think the net is a free speech zone then you obviously don't have many interesting things to say.

Not that simple, Mr. Troll

[DogDude]

I don't think it's as simple as you say that it is, Mr. Troll. There's also lots, and lots and lots of BAD and WRONG information out there. As an animal person who owns a pet supply shop, I know that animal people very often can obsess about their hobby. I have people tell me the most riduclous, wrong, and even dangerous things that they seem to think are true because they read it online. There's a massive amount of bad information on the web because any moron can post anything they'd like and call it fact. And then, we also have groupthink where something *must* be true because *everybody* else agrees on it (hence, the problem with Wikipedia and its ilk). Information is being cheapened and dilluted with so much crap, it's tough to sort out the good from the bad. That's kinda' why libraries aren't going to go anywhere anytime soon.

I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogger"

[putko]

Why these stupid terms "blog" and "blogger"?

Why not just "write" and "writer"?

The fact that it gets distributed primarily over a network (the internet) is immaterial. The point is that the cost is cheap/free, when before you had to own a press and have a way to distribute it.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[DogDude]

There's a huge difference between a "Writer" and a "blogger". "Writer" generally connotes some kind of skill or aptitude towards writing. Not everybody who posts intriguing details of a LAN party is a writer. In fact, most people are NOT writers. Anybody, though, can be a blogger. In fact, a "blogger" generally connotes somebody narcissistic who is NOT a writer. Stephen King, John Steinbeck, Hunter S. Thompson, and others are "writers". John224@aol.com is a "blogger".

"Bad" information

[sd_diamond]

I've always felt the issue of "bad" information (or "bad stuff" in general) on the web was not as terrible a thing as people make it out to be. As Berners-Lee says, that is just the result of people communicating. For every good idea out there, there are a thousand or a million that are pure crap. That's the way it always has been and always will be, no matter what the medium. And attempts to filter and/or censor the crap can possibly even be harmful, because it will produce a generation of people with no critical thinking skills and non-functioning B.S. detectors -- people who expect "good" information to be nicely packaged and channeled to them by Those Who Know Better. Which, of course, is exactly the kind of populace that any authority structure wants to have.

Further interesting stuff

[Bozovision]

If this article interested you and you are in the UK or Europe, then this conference about blogging and other social uses of software may interest you. You'll probably find it especially interesting if you have an entrepreneurial bent.

Disclosure: This is a blatant bit of self promotion since I'm involved in organising it.

No point to Karma if you don't use it occasionally.

Re:Who does he think he is?

[maxwell demon]

He invented the World Wide Web.

Summary of article:

[Pentavirate]

ML: Do you feel guilty for the web?

TBL: No.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[BarryNorton]

There's a huge difference between a "Writer" and a "blogger"

Too right! Owning a blog doesn't make you a writer - and regularly updating a blog or a podcast does not make you a journalist - any more than owning a camcorder makes you a director.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[BarryNorton]

Kinda like calling anybody who can make a web page a "programmer"

"Developer"'s bad enough... grrrrrr! ;)

Whaaaa?

[That's Unpossible!]

Correct use and spelling of "solipsistic."

References to "Fareignheight 411."

HEAD ASPLODES!

All you need to know about blogging!

[sleighb0y]

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.ht ml?uc_full_date=20050703

BBC News Article Different Edit From Newsnight

[BarryNorton]

The full interview with TBL is only to be broadcast later in the year. The 'highlights' in the Newsnight programme (just finished) were quite different from this article... in a bad way. All they did was talk about terrorism and pornography for nine minutes, and the Semantic Web for one!

As a researcher in the Semantic Web area (specifically Semantic Web Services), I'm very disappointed by both edits...

Transcript Airing & Incomplete

[baadger]

I think it's worth noting that what was aired wasn't the same as the transcript linked in the article. One of the more interesting things touched on was the semantic web and I think TBL made a very good layman's description of what it means to surfers.

For the next 24 hours you can catch a repeat of the aired version on the Newsnight website (It loops and it's starting as I type so give it 15-20 minutes from now)

"The full interview can be seen on BBC 4 later in the summer".

Re:Who does he think he is?

[BarryNorton]

He invented the World Wide Web

You've just been trolled! But since you have, I might as well correct you as well...

TBL didn't really 'invent' the WWW, it was a development and practicalisation of the hypertext ideas of Nelson, taken together with the benefits of, and incremental improvements upon, existing digital publishing systems like gopher. Sir Tim has a great practical mind and implemented a pretty good system for the task in hand, which turned out to be more generally useful (despite its flaws in scaling up)...

Last year I did a crappy Halloween Blog

[bahwi]

Last year I did a (crappy) Halloween Blog. This year I'm using Wordpress, mobblogging and my phone(and a real digicam) so I can post "live from the field" so to speak. I'm getting search hits from Google already this year so I set the blog up early. I also plan to take comments/reviews from any online users and people I meet, to try and give well rounded reviews. Blogs are great because of the ease and simplicity of doing these kinds of things. Little to no HTML to deal with, and I can send it from my phone to mobblog it without even being near a computer!

And because I have crazy arse phone, I can take out my Digital Camera's memory, stick it into my phone, and email with good mobblog pictures instead of relying soly on the phone's camera.

Re:The road to sollipsism?

[linzeal]

Humanity is mostly cattle to be fed upon in times of emergency. Stirring cattle to imagination is a pointless extravagance when most of them are incable of original thought to begin with. The masses have been complained at by the elite time and again for lack of individualism but radical individualism is bedlam. Let the 40 year old father of 2 keep daydreaming he is fucking Claudia Schiffer when he bangs his 30k in plastic surgery trophy wife, drinking his canned swill in his A/C half a million dollar McMansion so that he can get up in the morning and do a job that none of us could dream doing, being middle management.

Re:Parent is NOT flamebait!

[mdwh2]

Some guy who sits around saying "Bush Sucks" or "Liberals Suck" or "I installed Foo .9.3 on my Gentoo Box!!111!1"

You're talking about Slashdot here, right?

Zonk and blogging stories

[The Hobo]

YAZBS (Yet Another Zonk Blogging Story)

Look for the magic word in the title/summary/links:
One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen

There's probably more, but there's definitely a trend

Re:Who does he think he is?

[Bassman59]

[i]"He (Berners-Lee) invented the World Wide Web."[/i] He did so soon after facetiousness was invented.

Just watched the interview

[mustafap]

It was rather lame.

The transcript should have been a warning sign; I was hoping that the interview would be interesting to watch. Sadly, Tim appeared rather dull. Radio 4 will present the full 1/2 hour interview later this week; If tonight was the highlights, I think I'll be washing my hair that night.

M.

Re:bad web sites? like...

[ScentCone]

like web sites that suggest that the administrations...

Yes, those pillars of credibility and intellectual honesty. They and their brothers in integrity (you know, the blogs about alien abduction, angel visitations, and other equally tinfoil-hatted observations)... have you noticed that they're all free to just rant all the hell they want? Or, they are here, anyway. And in Australia, and Britain, and Spain (as long as they're not actually specifically saying to march out and kill people - that's a wee bit different). But they're sure not as able to in Iran. And they sure as hell weren't in Iraq (now sporting 1500 new independent news sources including newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and others that would have been summarily shot under Saddam or by the Taliban in Afghanistan, not that you care, obviously).

if it weren't for the mainstream media's absolute backing of the administration, imagine the horrors we would be subject to?

Are you one of these people that thinks "mainstream media" does NOT include ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, CNN, and so on? They all take endless opportunities to spin precisely against the administration. It's only when they get caught doing something as blatant and in writing as forging documents while trying to influence an election (CBS) that they have to actually show some temporarily neutral ethics and pretend that's not how they lean (and act).

stuff like schools not having to have 75 students per teacher

The average is well less than half that, as you well know, though less is better. But it's not about money, it's about how the schools use it. I live near DC, where the average amount spent per public school student per year is almost $11,000. Do you have any idea the quality of the private education (complete with small classes) you can buy with that sort of money? But the students in DC fail miserably, aren't held to anything like workable standards, and have terrible crime problems.

roads being kept up

Let's see... that would be the roads that were absolutely perfect up until 5 or 6 years ago? Folks like Clinton had every pothole filled and every bridge replaced, and Bush just undid all that fine work? Any chance that state governments and congress have a little to do with that? Doesn't matter - we finally got a decent transportation bill through just last year, and now we'll spend a decade making up for the stuff that wasn't done in the last 20.

hospitals well-funded

Hospitals are very well funded. Unfortunately, things having nothing to do with treating patients tend to sap the life out of them. Things like ambulence chasing lawyers taking millions of dollars per case out a hospital's budget when someone dies from, essentially, old age. Think how many people could be treated with the money that frivalous suits and giant punative awards suck away. And in order to avoid those suits, hospitals trot out $20,000 worth of tests for every uncomfortable patient, effectively making each slightly alarming medical episode consume more in medical costs than the typical patient will ever chip in for health insurance and medicare taxes in their entire lives.

millions of new jobs being created

You mean, like the 4 million jobs that have been created since the bottom of the recession that was under way as Clinton was leaving office? Despite the huge economic impact of 9/11 and the new overhead burdens of dealing with it? Or does 4 million not count as "millions" for you?

those damn ay-rabs are gonna get us

But at least there are 3000 of us they won't get. Um, since they already did.

the air force didn't respond until half an hour after the planes that hit the towers, when normally they respond within seconds

You don't even know what you're talking about, or you know you're BS-ing, which is more likely. The Air Force doesn't respond in seconds to much of anything, and only responds

Re:The road to sollipsism?

[Tim Browse]

Does anyone else have something they would like to share with the group?

Re:Who does he think he is?

[doom]

BarryNorton wrote:

He invented the World Wide Web

You've just been trolled! But since you have, I might as well correct you as well...

TBL didn't really 'invent' the WWW, it was a development and practicalisation of the hypertext ideas of Nelson, taken together with the benefits of, and incremental improvements upon, existing digital publishing systems like gopher. Sir Tim has a great practical mind and implemented a pretty good system for the task in hand, which turned out to be more generally useful (despite its flaws in scaling up)...

In other words he invented the WWW. As opposed to "hypertext" or "the internet".

Zing!

[CarrionBird]

Nice one.

Re:Zing!

[mustafap]

:o)

Re:Zing!

[mustafap]

opps.

OK, I'll go back to sleep...

[Hosiah]

Yeesh, nothing like some Ivory Tower Toff going Huff and Puff about what He Thinks the global communications network should be like. His claim to have "created the first website" strikes a familiar chord - was he waiting right behind Al Gore? Or was that the motivation for Al Gore to create the internet? As a programmer would say, "Race condition!"

Uh, yeah, sure, we'll scrape everything but cricket scores and your favorite girly site off the net right away, Mr. Hyphenated-Last-Name.

Re:OK, I'll go back to sleep...

[hawkeye_82]

Check here
Stupid Troll

Re:OK, I'll go back to sleep...

[Hosiah]

No, hawkeye_82, check here:
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
here:
http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/19991215.html
and here:
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_program.html?progra m_id=34

Note that this jargon file entry refers to internet users as "old-timers" a mere two years later in 1993:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-t hat-never-ended.html

And Sonny, next time save it for the script kiddies. Some of us were "old-timers" before you ever heard of computers. Most especially you can stick your public graffiti (Wiki, Everything I&II, etc.) where the sun don't shine when it comes to citing it as an authorative source; anybody can write it. Granted, you can change the definition of what a "web page" is to include the latest technology, your choice of proprietary system, etc, and claim to have been "first". By the same logic, SCO owns Linux, everybody who's ever created a .gif file owes Unisys a settlement, and Microsoft invented the GUI. But a web page is JUST files on a server. A web site is JUST a server with files that's accessible to other computers via some kind of wire. It gets tricky, here, because the old acoustic modems weren't "wires" as such, at one point, they were rubber cups you set the old-fashioned kind of phone reciever in. And don't get me started on RFC 1149 (proposed in 1990)!

And if ignorance were light bulbs, you'd be General Electric.

Re:OK, I'll go back to sleep...

[Hosiah]

Now to address any OTHER arguments from other Slashdotters:

Yeah, Tim Berners-Lee started HTML. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language". This was NOT the first time anybody thought of feeding marked text through a program to make it format a certain way for the purposes of facilitating communication. Vannevar Bush did that in 1945. Nor was it the first time the idea was implemented - there's SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language, circa 1970's/1980's. Let's also give a nod to Tex, by Donald Knuth circa 1986, not to mention Unix's troff.

There's a ton more where this came from. I may know most of everything, but I'm not about to keep it all in my head at once, and I'll be durned if I'll go scurrying around looking up the rest of it just cuz some upstart snip hurls a derogatory hack at me, in reaction to my comparing "I published the first web page!" with "I created the internet!" Yeah, sure, and Bill Gates ported BASIC over to his tinker-toy box and WROTE THE FIRST PROGRAM!!! Which is not to compare him to Bill Gates (I save that insult for lower life forms...), but to Al Gore (who DID help facilitate some laws that year that spread the internet a little bit wider.)

But test me further, I'm sure I'll remember some more...

Re:OK, I'll go back to sleep...

[bbc]

Hey moron, the claim was that he invented the web, which he did. But I guess you haven't been on the internet long enough to know the difference. It will still take a long time for you to become an old-timer.

Re:OK, I'll go back to sleep...

[Hosiah]

Hey moron, the claim was that he invented the web

No, the claim at the top of the article to which this enlightened thread is appended thereto plainly says exactly what I said it says, no more, no less, in the same English you're talking in now. Even the Wiki article proferred by the other enriched genius identified a slew of other contributers. To say one person "invented the web", by themselves, with no outside contributions, is the same logical absurdity as to credit one individual with inventing government, cooking, or running. But clearly, I've given you words far too long for your vocabulary to have not been exhausted by now, so I'll just have to sign off with "up yours, too, moron!" and hope you weren't too taxed to get this far.

Re:Maddox on blogging idiots

[Omniscientist]

Funny coming from Maddox, since his website seems to be much like a blog itself. Quite a hoot to read though.

Who wants to build it out?

[Forbman]

e that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it. "

What would the Taliban in Afghanistan want it to be like? What about the American Taliban, er, the neoCons? What would Pol Pot have had it do?

Before we assume that the forces of "light" and all that is good and sweet will do it, let's prepare for what the darker sides of us (because all this bad things that are driving American political dialog right now) will allow it to be, and assume that it will happen.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[snap2grid]

Why these stupid terms "blog" and "blogger"? Why not just "write" and "writer"?

Why not 'correspondent' or 'playwright' or 'columnist' or 'reviewer' or 'novelist' or 'scriptwriter'? A blogger is a specific kind of writing, just as all those other ones are specific.

Example: Q) What do you write? A) An uncommissioned opinion piece which is half-researched, half-opinion, possibly quite local in scope in the form of a journal, but perhaps with some conversational elements?

Oh, you mean a blog.

Re:The road to sollipsism?

[ccmay]

Let the 40 year old father of 2 keep daydreaming he is fucking Claudia Schiffer when he bangs his 30k in plastic surgery trophy wife, drinking his canned swill in his A/C half a million dollar McMansion so that he can get up in the morning and do a job that none of us could dream doing, being middle management.

Sounds pretty good to me. Where do I sign up?

-ccm

Re:Maddox on blogging idiots

[bbc]

Thank you for that insightful post, but perhaps next time you could save it for your blog, where it would be more at home.

(I did, of course, notice that your mind was taking a crap.)

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[bbc]

When TBL invented the web, he wanted it to be RW, but it got repurposed almost immediately; something we (there's that "we" again) only notice when angstridden little BBC-reporters forget to prepare for an interview and are outed as the nth gatekeeper afraid to lose out to a medium they will never in a million years understand. But that aside...

Today, we (ywy) have to invent new words to describe that which the web ever was really about: wiki, blog. You're right that we should be speaking about author and page and mean the same thing as when we say blogger and wiki, but we're past that.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[bbc]

"I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks so."

Well, they say one is born every day.

"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"."

A writer is someone who writes, just like a cook is someone who cooks.

Sounds to me though that you are hooked on authority. You must have been pleased as punch when that "writer" from the BBC tried to take old Tim down a peg or two. That'll show him!

"Kinda like calling anybody who can make a web page a "programmer". Big difference."

Big difference indeed, because a web page is not a program, but a document. But I guess someone who likes his authority deep inside from behind makes his documents with MS Word, where the difference is indeed negligable.

Bah!

Traditional gatekeeper stuff

[bbc]

Traditional story of a gatekeeper who is so afraid of losing his job to this here new-fangled medium that he is trying to blame TBL of everything that is wrong in this world.

Hey, Slashdot, how about a _real_ interview with TBL? Or at least, next time you write about something like this what I shall loosely refer to as an interview, give it a heading like "BBC blames Tim Berners-Lee for terrorism", which is of course the real news behind this story.

Specific?

[wiredog]

How? What you think of as 'bad' may be different from what I think of as 'bad'. Sounds like he wants smarter search filtering.

Re:The road to sollipsism?

[tanguyr]

errr, i'm the guy arguing that people *should* be allowed to filter what they see, remember?

forget preview - try forethought.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[bbc]

Re: inventing new words to describe the old default situation.

This is called shifting baselines, I found out just a minute ago. (Via Joho the Blog.)

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[mdwh2]

Why not 'correspondent' or 'playwright' or 'columnist' or 'reviewer' or 'novelist' or 'scriptwriter'? A blogger is a specific kind of writing, just as all those other ones are specific.

Example: Q) What do you write? A) An uncommissioned opinion piece which is half-researched, half-opinion, possibly quite local in scope in the form of a journal, but perhaps with some conversational elements?

Oh, you mean a blog.

Though to be fair, professional or commissioned journalism doesn't always well researched or free from bias and opinion. In fact, often quite the opposite, sadly.

I agree that using more specific terms than just "writer" is a good thing, but the problem with "blogger" is that it is not specific in the same way at all. A "blogger" could be keeping a journal, talking to their friends, posting some creative writing, giving opinion on news events or anything else. Whilst not all bloggers may be writers, is someone no longer a writer if they post onto a web page? Of course not.

The only thing specific about "blogger" is the technology being used, which is independent of what is being written.

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[DogDude]

Sounds to me though that you are hooked on authority.

No, I hate to see knowledge, information, and skill watered down. Not every Joe Schmoe is an expert just because they say that they are. That kind of weak, lame justification is exactly what religion rests on... the book is true because the book says it's true. Those of us who actually take the time to learn a subject, or a skill have to fight against the idiotic masses every day, as is, without having every idiot call themselves a "writer" or a "programmer" (web pages are rarely a simple "document" any more, FYI) or a "mechanic", etc., etc.

Holy shit... I just found a fossil in the parking lot gravel... I guess I'm a paleontoligist... or maybe an archaeologist, too!

Re:The road to sollipsism?

[linzeal]

Get a degree in International Business learn to speak Mandarin or Japanese and you are in. Takes 3-4 years of your life, everyone is doing it.

At last! I found the reference I half-remembered!

[Hosiah]

But first, *I*, at least, will apologize for pissing everybody off so much. This ain't my usual reception! I really didn't see where all the nasty attitude in the responses was coming from: scanning the remainder of the discussion, many other Slashdotters were expressing similar disgust at the idea of somebody calling for censorship for taste reasons. OTHER people managed to say, "Get this guy! Who's gonna decide what's good and bad, hmm?" and not get called names about it. But 'hookay, whatever holy idol some people have evidentally made of whatsis-hyphenship, I'm sorry to have unwittingly pissed on it.

Now then, here's where I was coming from: define difference between internet and world wide web:

"The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet."
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/ Web_vs_Internet.asp

Which I take to mean "web is to internet as window manager is to desktop environment". Yeah, but show me a case of the latter that works without the former!

Next, some prior history of computer-based communications before what we mostly refer to as "The World-Wide Web" (tm):

"Around the same time another change was happening in the SGML community. Bell Atlantic Engineers, in 1987, introduced an online service that featured graphic representations of office documents, in color, exchanged over the Internet. They had two options: employ a simplified generic SGML DTD as their exchange format or use the editorial-based IMI format. They picked the wrong option perhaps one of the top five worst decisions ever made! Another product, designed for optical media publishing, called Guide from Owl, Ltd. introduced a simple four-tag SGML DTD that could be used to interpret any document into their retrieval program. Although neither of these first simplified SGML applications survived, some students at CERN were paying attention, wrote their own simplified tag set, the hyper text markup language, developed a browser and gave it away! It caught on and the worldwide web was born."
http://www.media4theworld.com/Papers/Symbolic_logi c_4.htm

At this point, considering that, at the very worst, I've been following a different version of the story from the one other people follow, I say everybody who flamed me about this owes me a beer.

Now, if the claim was "Mr. Berners-Lee was the first to publish a page on the internet using HTML formatting on what later became the World-Wide Web (tm)", I could go, "Ooooooh, THAT first web page!" I mean, of *course* he was the first to use the HTML language he was writing, if for nothing else than to check for bugs! Incidentally, HTML wasn't even HIS first foray into electronic document formatting - that would be Enquire, and when he worked on *that*, he didn't even know the term "hypertext" existed...kind of like how Linus Torvalds unwittingly supplied the GNU movement with the free kernel they needed without ever hearing of GNU. That would explain where my repressed memories of reading documents in something called "hypertext" (which, at the time, I associated with "hypercard") on an 80's-era Mac came from. In any case, to me it's all Ford vs Chevy, Coke vs Pepsi. XML, SHTML, HML, potatoe, pahtahto. ASCII text with funny dinguses in it to tell a program how to display the regular text. A means for graphic representations of office documents, in color, to be exchanged over the Internet. Of which HTML is merely a subset.

As for "The Web"(tm) as opposed to any old web, I guess back when I was a zitty kid with friends named Poindexter, Eugene, and Huey, and we looked at a bunch of teletypes connected together and called it a "web network", turns out that that wasn't such a common expression. What, didn't *anybody* else here subscribe to Telex?

To heck with this. I don't care who started what, anymore. And I *hate* HTML!

Re:I really don't like the words "blog" and "blogg

[bbc]

"No, I hate to see knowledge, information, and skill watered down."

Well, you're a hacker, and that's cool.

But we weren't talking about what it takes to be a good writer, we were talking about what the word "writer" means. And a writer is somebody who writes.