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]

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?

[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.

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?

[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?

[mustafap]

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

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.

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?

[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?

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

[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...

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.

In other words

[csoto]

Tim wants more good pr0n!

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.

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.

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"

[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"

[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"

[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"

[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.

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!

[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.

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: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: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.

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".

Summary of article:

[Pentavirate]

ML: Do you feel guilty for the web?

TBL: No.

Whaaaa?

[That's Unpossible!]

Correct use and spelling of "solipsistic."

References to "Fareignheight 411."

HEAD ASPLODES!

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...

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.

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.