[Ecommerce] Berners-Lee on the read/write web

Tue Aug 9 10:53:00 2005

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4132752.stm

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

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

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

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

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

  When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just
write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the
direction of becoming more of a creative medium

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a rewritable web

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

TBL: Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would
have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an
editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web
had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web
page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much
what blogging is about.

For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most
people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web
pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with
blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much
more simple.

When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just
write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the
direction of becoming more of a creative medium.

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

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

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

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

Powerful tool

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

TBL: Well I don't see that stuff.

  My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to
the building of something very new and special, which we can't imagine
now

Tim Berners-Lee
ML: But you know it's there though?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINKS TO MORE TECHNOLOGY STORIES

SelectDiscovery returns safely to EarthCanada snaps up hi-tech radarTeens
urged to be future thinkers'Thoughts read' via brain scansReports of Vista
virus rebuttedNTL ramps up broadband offeringDixons to end 35mm camera
salesMessaging win for mobile bloggersApple scores Japanese music hitLegal
fight over iTunes UK domainEthics issue for citizen snappersPolice chief's
plea over e-mailsLaser spots paper 'fingerprints'Jail sentence for piracy
coupleTesting times for video downloadsSony acts to stop UK PSP
importsGameplay dents stylish Killer 7

Get more Newsnight
Watch again online, highlights and find out about the presenters

SEE ALSO:
Web inventor is 'Greatest Briton'
28 Jan 05 |  UK
Creator of the web turns knight
16 Jul 04 |  Technology
New honour for the web's inventor
15 Apr 04 |  Technology
Net guru peers into web's future
25 Sep 03 |  Technology
Web's inventor gets a knighthood
31 Dec 03 |  Technology
Web pioneer opens digital divide summit
10 Dec 03 |  Technology
Web pioneer scoops Japan Prize
14 Dec 01 |  Sci/Tech

RELATED BBC LINKS:
Newsnight

RELATED INTERNET LINKS:
Tim Berners-Lee
World Wide Web Consortium
Semantic Web roadmap
Cern
Tim Berners-Lee first website
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
Consumer Project on Technology in London
24, Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RX,UK.
Tel:+44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252.
Mob:+44(0)790 386 4642. Fax: +44(0)207 354 0607
http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036, USA
Tel.:  1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727

--
Michelle Childs -Head of European Affairs
Consumer Project on Technology in London
24, Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RX,UK.
Tel:+44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252.
Mob:+44(0)790 386 4642. Fax: +44(0)207 354 0607
http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036, USA
Tel.:  1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176

Consumer Project on Technology in Geneva
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727