Tim Berners-Lee: This is for Everyone

I saw Tim Berners-Lee talk at Scarborough a while back. He’s a great public speaker. Plus, he invented the World Wide Web. He also writes books. His latest, This is for Everyone, describes how he came to invent the web, what happened to his invention and where he thinks it should go next. It’s a first-class properly thought provoking read. For me the best bits are the first bit, where he describes the circumstances that led to the development of the web, and the last bits where he puts the latest technical developments, including AI, into a web context.

The middle bit is interesting too, but it left me feeling a bit depressed as it tells the story of an system invented to improve the lot of everyone being bent and twisted into shapes that benefit just the corporate few. Having said that though, it is very impressive that so many of the original. open ideals still underpin the web today.

The book is thoroughly upbeat about technology and it would be lovely to think that ideas such as Solid (which propose managed storage for all) could gain widespread acceptance. I’m going to have a look at the technology, and I suggest that you do too.