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The Internet

Tim Berners-Lee on Blogging And The Web 226

Posted by Zonk from the daddy! dept.
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. "
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Tim Berners-Lee on Blogging And The Web More

Tim Berners-Lee on Blogging And The Web

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  • 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

    • Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 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 ch
      • 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

        • Re:What Question would you have asked Sir TBL? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by maxwell demon ( 590494 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @04:12PM (#13281917) Journal
          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?
      • 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.
      • "...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
    • 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 ge

    • Summary of article: (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Pentavirate ( 867026 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @04:27PM (#13281993) Homepage Journal
      ML: Do you feel guilty for the web?

      TBL: No.

  • What the fuck is this? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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 s
    • 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
    • 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 ag

      • Re:What the fuck is this? (Score:4, Funny)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:06PM (#13281479)
        . . 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
      • 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 worthwhi

    • Re:What the fuck is this? (Score:5, Funny)

      by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:07PM (#13281485) Homepage
      >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.

    • 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
      • 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 t

      • 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

        -
      • 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

  • the Read/Write web? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by yecrom2 ( 461240 )
    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?

  • Bad? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dthrall ( 894750 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:41PM (#13281273)
    "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/ [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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hal9000(jr) ( 316943 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:00PM (#13281425)
      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? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tanguyr ( 468371 ) <tanguyr+slashdot@gmail.com> on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:05PM (#13281466) Homepage
      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?
    • 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 administrat

  • The junk is hard to avoid (Score:3, Interesting)

    by genericacct ( 692294 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:42PM (#13281282)
    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.

  • What you mean "we"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hcg50a ( 690062 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:42PM (#13281283) Journal
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by csoto ( 220540 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:46PM (#13281315)
    Tim wants more good pr0n!

    • 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... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sierpinski ( 266120 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:46PM (#13281323)
    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... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:09PM (#13281495) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • 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.
      • 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.
    • 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
    • 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 f

  • Who and who? (Score:3, Informative)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:50PM (#13281356)
    "Marc Lawson with Tim Berners-Lee"

    Who and who?

    • Re:Who and who? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jeff Hornby ( 211519 )
      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! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nantoka ( 894242 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:50PM (#13281357)
    "..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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rackhamh ( 217889 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:51PM (#13281359)
    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" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:52PM (#13281367) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • 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...
    • 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?

      • 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 completel
        • 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" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:09PM (#13281504)
      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.
      • 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" (Score:5, Informative)

      by an_mo ( 175299 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:14PM (#13281542) Journal
      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.
    • 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.
      • 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.
        • 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" (Score:2, Insightful)

      by coflow ( 519578 )
      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" (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 )
      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 pa

      • Re:He likes "blogs" (Score:3, Insightful)

        by groomed ( 202061 )
        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.
        • 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 w
          • 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 anywher

        • 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.
    • 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

    • 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.

      • 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 u

  • How about getting CSS 2.1 recommended sometime this decade? It's only been three years [w3.org]. 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? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves ( 236787 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @02:58PM (#13281405)
    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.
    • 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
    • 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.

  • Ay, there's the rub! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheAwfulTruth ( 325623 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @03:01PM (#13281428) Homepage
    "...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.
    • 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! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jherek Carnelian ( 831679 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @04:53PM (#13282146)
      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.
      • 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
  • 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 creat
  • 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.
  • If this article interested you and you are in the UK or Europe, then this conference [oursocialworld.com] 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.

  • BBC News Article Different Edit From Newsnight (Score:3, Informative)

    by BarryNorton ( 778694 ) on Tuesday August 09, 2005 @05:19PM (#13282332)
    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...

  • 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 [bbc.co.uk] (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".
  • 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
  • YAZBS (Yet Another Zonk Blogging Story)

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

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

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