"Steve was a champion of usable technology - even sexy technology. Intuitive on the outside and extensible and cool engineering on the inside. The geeks among us need to be at the same time deeply insistent technically on beautiful, clean, extensible design inside, and utterly impatient as naive end users about the outside."

""What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do."" "“I wanted to build a creative space, something like a sandpit where everyone could play together," he says now. "Life was very simple. I was too busy to think about the bigger questions. I was writing specs for the web, writing the code. My priority was getting more people to use it, looking for communities who might adopt it. I just wanted the thing to take off. … If I had made the web into a product, it would have been in somebody's interest to make an incompatible version of it," he says. … We have to start talking about a human right to connect. … We are still learning the ground rules. Certainly, one-to-one time without any electronics is something that people should treasure. … the World Wide Web is an open platform. I'm pleased that it was designed very cleanly so that programs can talk to each other across the net. It means that there is one information space where you can put everything. … If large corporations control our access to the internet and determine which websites we can go to, we will lose its openness and its democratic nature. We can all help to campaign for the right to connect. … The web is now coming of age. We have to look at it and decide how best to use it for science and technology. I think it can do uniquely important things … When I started the web, I wanted to foster creative interconnectivity, in which people from all around the world can build something together. It's about trying to create a sort of human meta-brain - getting connected brains to function as a greater human brain. With these things, we have to trust in humanity. I think human nature, on balance, is wonderful. If we use the web properly, we can enhance that.""

"This report explores key trends and challenges to the right of all individuals to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds through the Internet. The Special
Rapporteur underscores the unique and transformative nature of the Internet not only to
enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, but also a
range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole. Chapter III
of the report underlines the applicability of international human rights norms and standards
on the right to freedom of opinion and expression to the Internet as a communication
medium, and sets out the exceptional circumstances under which the dissemination of
certain types of information may be restricted. Chapters IV and V address two dimensions
of Internet access respectively: (a) access to content; and (b) access to the physical and
technical infrastructure required to access the Internet in the first place. More specifically,
chapter IV outlines some of the ways in which States are increasingly censoring
information online, namely through: arbitrary blocking or filtering of content;
criminalization of legitimate expression; imposition of intermediary liability; disconnecting
users from Internet access, including on the basis of intellectual property rights law; cyberattacks; and inadequate protection of the right to privacy and data protection. Chapter V
addresses the issue of universal access to the Internet. The Special Rapporteur intends to
explore this topic further in his future report to the General Assembly. Chapter VI contains
the Special Rapporteur’s conclusions and recommendations concerning the main subjects
of the report." https://twitter.com/#!/timberners_lee/statuses/78109081755320320: "RT @webfoundation: UN report: "... universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states" http://tinyurl.com/UN-Net-Right"

"the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected. … We create the Web, by designing computer protocols and software; this process is completely under our control. We choose what properties we want it to have and not have. … we the public, the scientific community and the press must make sure the Web’s principles remain intact—not just to preserve what we have gained but to benefit from the great advances that are still to come."

12.11.1990

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20479033986 : "Reading emails from nineteen years ago today. http://tinyurl.com/3xhsh54"

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20472111722 : "Well, I'll be! @timberners_lee proposed HTML5's outline algorithm for sections and headings 19 years ago. "

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20470534348 : "The earliest document ever published on the web is *almost* valid HTML5"

"Greater transparency across Government is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account; to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public spending; and to realise significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data. … To oversee the implementation of our transparency commitments, a Public Sector Transparency Board will be established in the Cabinet Office, which will be chaired by the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude. Board representation will include a mix of external experts and data users, and public sector data specialists; members will include Tom Steinberg, one of the UK’s leading experts on data transparency."

"name, job title, grade & salary level of senior civil servants across Whitehall with salaries more than £150,000 was released – the first time some of this information has ever been made public. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, acting on commitments made in the Coalition Agreement, has overseen the publication. The release of key government datasets will enable people to hold politicians & public bodies to account. The Minister will also chair the new Public Sector Transparency Board based at the Cabinet Office, which will drive the Government’s cross government transparency agenda. The Board will be responsible for setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal Right to Data. Other board members will include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, from the University of Southampton, & Tom Steinberg, founder of mysociety – some of the country’s leading experts & advocates on transparency & open data."

"@nebulon82 Always been against snooping on net e.g. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/NoSnooping.html so #debill is major threat"

""Do you consider Internet access to be a fundamental right?" "There's a huge amount to be said in favour of making it a right. Yes, it's a right that comes after water but to disconnect a whole family would, I think, be what they call in the United States 'a cruel and unusual punishment' – which is unconstitutional in the US. When you make something a right, developed countries have a responsibility internally and externally to improve access. They have a moral obligation to act. In Europe, there would be huge benefits if everyone was online. Governments could serve all citizens entirely online instead of physically, making it more efficient and cheaper.""

"Openly available public data not only creates economic and social capital, it also creates bottom-up pressure to improve public services. Data is essential in enabling citizens to choose between public service providers. It helps them to compare their local services with services elsewhere. It enables all of us to lobby for improvement. Public data is a public good."

"Fine words. We’d like some actions to go with them. We’re hearing plenty of sticks being wielded over how people use the net – Lord Mandelson’s threats to file-sharers, for example – but the carrots for companies to build on something that really would benefit Britain, by using British data, seems to be stuck on a really slow train."

"the lesson of the Web, Mr. Berners-Lee said, is that making information and simple online tools freely available inevitably fuels innovation. If you liberate the data, he asked, who knows what applications people will create? “Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make,” he said. “But the openness, transparency and new uses of the data will make government run better, and that will make business run better as well.”"

"Historian John Naughton describes the Internet as an attempt to answer the following question: How do you design a network that is “future proof” -- that can support the applications that today’s inventors have not yet dreamed of? The solution was to devise a network of networks that would not be biased in favor of any particular application. The Internet’s creators didn’t want the network architecture -- or any single entity -- to pick winners and losers. Because it might pick the wrong ones. Instead, the Internet’s open architecture pushes decision-making and intelligence to the edge of the network -- to end users, to the cloud, to businesses of every size and in every sector of the economy, to creators and speakers across the country and around the globe. In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet is a “blank canvas” -- allowing anyone to contribute and to innovate without permission."

"Berners-Lee explained how it can connect to the Web with a simple URI (i.e. link): "I can give a URI to my phone [...] also the company that made it can give a URI to the model of the phone. They can also put online all the specs of the phone, and then I can make a link to say that my phone is an example of that product. So now any system which is dealing with me and has access to that data will be able to figure out the sorts of things I can do with my phone, which actually is really valuable." That scenario from Tim Berners-Lee was mostly from the consumer's point of view, but manufacturers and retailers can also do interesting things with their Internet-connected products." Track Usage, Brand Management, SaaS, Customer Service

"Governments and companies should limit the snooping they do on web users. So said Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who said that growing oversight of browsing could have a pernicious effect. A greater part of the value of the web lay in the lack of constraints on what people could do with it. He also warned that attempts to censor what people could say or what they could do online were ultimately doomed to failure. "When you use the internet it is important that the medium should not be set up with constraints," he said. The internet, said Sir Tim, should be like a blank piece of paper. Just as governments and companies cannot police what people write or draw on that sheet of paper so they should not be restricted from putting the web to their own uses."

"Bill Thompson: I saw the web first as a relative latecomer in 1993. The change that it has wrought - it's much bigger than television. What it's achieved in just twenty years is astounding. In fact it's more important even than print. Think about the web in evolutionary terms - like developing a new eye. Delivering us access to more than a raw collection of facts but to knowledge. One of the most important things we have done as a species."

http://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Abstract.html: "We must do more than empower the individual. We must allow people and machines interacting together to behave in new ways as a mass. Now that we can make trails though our information, we must create a substrate in which these trails will grow into an increasingly meaningful whole, rather than a tangled mass. We and our documents are capable of operating together as a large machine but not as a large mind. Groups of all sizes must acquire gifts of intuition, correlation and invention which we associate normally with people rather than machines, before we can rise to Bush's challenge to mankind to "grow in the wisdom of race experience", rather than "perish in conflict"."

""So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month," the Prime Minister said in a statement about electoral and Parliamentary reform." + http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/sir_tims_cry_raw_data_now.html

"What do you hope to achieve with the Web Science Research Initiative? The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no one expected. It has something like 1011 web pages in it and there are a similar number of neurons in the brain. The brain is something very complicated we don't understand - yet we rely on it. The web is very complicated too and, though we built it, we have no real data about the stability of the emergent systems that have cropped up on it."

"Why is it not possible to take data from one website & have a completely different website understand what it is & know what to do with it? ... because the underlying architecture of the data does not yet exist on the web ... is only now being built & in order for it to succeed it must be open ... He is supporting the Linked Data Open Movement ... a set of agreed standards but also agreements around so called Uniform Resource Identifiers ... a common standard which allow us to describe the world of things - from people to objects - in a way machines can understand & make use of. ... "Build a platform for others that follow, do not assume what they will use it for." Sir Tim ... once again expressed his opposition to ISPS using their role as a gateway to the web & the net, as a chance to mine commercial revenue from user activities while online. "It's key that ISPs provides with clean connection to the web, no snooping, no discrimination; like a water company provides water."

"20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together."

"The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data."

"Just been persuaded to join identi.ca because it streams RDF". via Martin (Twitter)

Lots of food for thought here ...

"Ideas around the formation of a web first began to gain traction when the desktop PC landed in the late 1980s, but it was Berners-Lee who focused on the notion of using the internet to share documents, according to Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at Southampton University, and founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative. "Tim pulled together ideas of a markup language, getting files on the internet and hypertext," she explained. "The things that made it work were open standards and protocols so anyone could set up their own web server and HTML documents, the fact that it was completely distributed and scalable, and that it worked over the network.""

"Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born. This week, it's a pleasure and an honour for us to welcome the Web's inventor back to CERN to mark this special anniversary at the place the Web was born." + http://www.webfoundation.org/2009/03/post-4.html, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/happy_20th_birthday_world_wide_web.php, http://www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html

"The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale."

I ""could ... release information of what I did on holiday including pictures & video - but license it in a way to say that you’re not allowed to use this for determining what I’ve been up to, to determine my pay raise or whether to employ me""

"TBL "the risk is not expecting too much of humanity but too little""

"TBL: don't think of web as a thing - it's connections between people. asking if web can solve x is really asking can we solve x"

"# The WWW is big, complex and important # We should study it # We should engineer it # We should prepare for a future we can't imagine". See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jul/09/web.sirtim

"TBL's site was also the first weblog. ... I remember looking at the site, with my own eyes, and realizing that I was looking at history, like listening to the first telephone conversation or watching Thomas Edison turn on his first electric light bulb"

"Web of the future will have BOTH documents and data. The Semantic Web will not supersede the current Web. They will coexist. ... the blogosphere was misled by an online version of a conventional organ. There are many who worry about the inverse"

"semantic meaning will have to be extracted by applications from perfectly ordinary web pages ... the adding of semantic knowledge to the content itself is unlikely"

"To the distress of civil liberties campaigners, our love of a bargain, and of being social, will see us surrender more of our privacy. And, of course, we still won't feel we're being watched as we surf."

"very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn't control which websites I go to, it doesn't monitor which websites I go to"

"Whereas the existing web is a collection of pages with links between them that ... search engines help the user to navigate, the "semantic web" will enable direct connectivity between much more low-level pieces of information ... a seamless web"

"HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts. Authors: TBL Tim Berners-Lee CERN/CN ... History: 25 Sep 90 Written (TBL) with the help of the Interface builder"

"Your original Web tool was a browser and an editor. Was it a mistake not to push harder to maintain that right back at the beginning?" "I really wish we could have for a lot of reasons." http://talis-podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.mp3

"The website of the world's first-ever web server"

"A screen shot taken from a NeXT computer running Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb browser"

"Sir Tim Berners-Lee's original computer, the first host for the "World Wide Web," invented at CERN. "

"XML is ten years old today. It feels like yesterday, or a lifetime. I wrote this that year (1998). It’s really long."

"we ... overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating" the longer-term; "Nobody knows how big the web is now ... estimates of the indexed part ... around 40bn pages ... 'deep web' ... between 400 & 750 times bigger"

"an early project (in the second half of 1980) of Tim Berners-Lee, who went on to create the World Wide Web in 1989. ENQUIRE had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was ... not supposed to be released to the general public"

"he chooses quietly to work on ways to ensure a future web of even greater openness and neutrality in scientific, intellectual and political exchange. He is what my grandfather would have called a real mensch"

"the man credited with inventing it all thinks of the Web more like the human mind"; ""In five years time, I hope people will be programming not at the document level, but at the application level""

good overview of TBL's piece on the social graph & the semantic web

"whichever device I use to look up the bookmark ... will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know ... from different sources ... many interactions. ... websites ... will be secondary ... network & ... devices tertiary"

"“I like being able to choose my hardware separately from choosing my software, and separately from choosing my content,” Berners-Lee said at the conference. There needs to be just one Web, he explained, and it needs to work on phones."

"Web's growing lack of intimacy ... symbolizes his one big disappointment with it. It was meant to be a social place. ... "It was an accident of fate that all the first [commercially successful] programs were browsers and not editors"

"Journal publication coexists peacefully with author self-archiving, even when it reaches 100%, with both researchers and their journals benefitting from the resulting enhanced research usage and impact."

"notion of a journal of medicine separate from a journal of bioinformatics, separate from the writings of physicists, chemists, psychologists and even kindergarten teachers ... as out of date as the print journal is becoming to our graduate students"

"This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system."

"In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. "Vague, but exciting", were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue." Brilliant!

"People working with the Semantic Web will make much more powerful things. We can't imagine what they will do. But we have to build the Web to be an infrastructure."

Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM

"The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights. Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline."

"Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web & to create approaches that allow new powerful & more beneficial patterns to occur." Access via http://www.webscience.org/publications/.

"brings together academics, scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs & decision makers … to create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web & offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use & design."

"The paper book contains a glossary. This is a hypertext version with links to supporting and related material. (@ indicates missing link). Rather than give a long list of URIs in the book, I just give you this page online."

"from 1945 to 1995" + links

"Supplementary material … This book is written to address the questions most people ask - From "What were you thinking when you invented it?" through "So what do you think of it now?" to "Where is this all going to take us?", this is the story"