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Friday, Oct. 6, 2000
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Mind Trails
TIME Speaks with Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee
The World Wide Web has become so strongly associated with the United States and Silicon Valley that it's easy to forget it was invented by an Englishman — Tim Berners-Lee — at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) near Geneva. Berners-Lee is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization created in October 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential by developing common protocols and ensuring interoperability. The paperback version of "Weaving the Web," his account of the Web's invention, has just been published by Texere. As the Web approaches its 10th anniversary, Berners-Lee talks about its future as a medium for creative collaboration.
"The Web isn't a brain. It doesn't think. The challenging thing was that brains can remember random associations and very unstructured information, while computers systems could not. But the Web has this unstructured nature that allows you to store random associations. The power of the Web is that a hyperlink can point to anything. If a hyperlink could only point to a certain kind of information, the Web would not be the universal space that it must be. There is no one thing that the Web is for. The moment that there is one thing that the Web is for, it will stop. So, what's interesting is how our brains can work together on the Web.
If someone in an organization expresses a problem and someone else on the other side of the organization has the solution, how many clicks are there between those two people? How can other people help make that connection? One answer is for people to browse around and make links when they realize they are relevant, but to make links that cause other people to follow them. Links will spread from the solution and from the problem, and after awhile the links will overlap and people will be more likely to make the jump that leads to the solution. To be able to really use the Web means that one person's mind must be able to leave a trail that other people can follow.
Like bookmarking. Bookmarking is a very, very crude form of creativity. We create this very constrained document, which is really just a list of lists, and we don't share it with anybody. When a typical person surfs the Web that's all they are creating. Imagine if they had much more creative tools. Imagine that they could drag links about all kinds of things not just into bookmarks but into pages and folders. This would be a very powerful intuitive tool for grouping information and saving relationships, which could be sent as input to somebody else. This could form the basis for a more powerful organization, a more powerful political process.
I'm happy with the diversity of information on the Web — diversity is essential to the Web's value as a universal space — but I'm not satisfied at all with the ability of anybody to be creative on the Web. That will change as we understand how to make annotation servers work, how to store the sticky yellow labels we would love to stick on webpages. But as a user, how do you manage groups of sticky labels stuck on by different people from all over the planet? Creativity on the Web will also change when we have a web of trust that allows us to authenticate people, to really trust the people we are talking to, which is a prerequisite for real collaboration.
At the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org) we try to push the boundaries of collaboration. If you come to a meeting and want to discuss your document, it has to be on the Web. If it isn't, you throw it into a space we call 'team space,' which is accessible to anybody on the team who wants to follow the discussion. You can set up your browser so that whenever a website is mentioned in the meeting, the browser automatically tracks that URL and displays the site that's being talked about.
We use the Web very seriously, tracking changes to documents, controlling access, discovering all the social systems you have to implement before people will actually use it. Sophisticated though the Web may seem, the moment you try to use it as a collaborative medium you realize we're really still at the early stages. We're pioneering, and things crash every now and again. That's what life is like at the leading edge; that's what we do as a matter of principle — and it's fun."
To read Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 proposal for a global hypertext project at CERN, go to: http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
PHOTO BY SAM OGDEN - SPL
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