Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: Tim Berners-Lee

  • Exciting but vague

    Exciting but vague

    On Tuesday Tim Berners-Lee rounded off his Australian speaking tour with a City Talks presentation before 2,000 people at a packed Sydney Town Hall.

    After an interminable procession of sponsor speeches, Berners-Lee covered many of the same topics in his presentations at the Sydney CSIRO workshop the previous week and the Melbourne talk the night before.

    These included a call for everyone to learn some computer coding skills – or at least get to know someone who has some, wider technology education opportunities, more women in computing fields and a warning about the perils of government over-surveillance.

    On government monitoring Internet traffic, Berners-Lee has been strident at all his talks and correctly points out most of our web browsing histories allow any outrageous conclusion to be drawn, particularly by suspicious law enforcement agencies and the prurient tabloid media.

    Who owns the ‘off switch’ is also a concern after the Mubarak regime cut Egypt off the Internet during the Arab Spring uprising. The willingness of governments to cut connectivity in times of crisis is something we need to be vigilant against.

    The web’s effect on the media was discussed in depth as well with Sean Aylmer, editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, saying in his introduction that Berners-Lee’s invention had been the defining feature of Aylmer’s career.

    While the web has been traumatic for a generation of newspapermen, Berners-Lee sees good news for journalists in the data explosion, “how do we separate the junk from the good stuff?” Asks Tim, “this is the role for journalists and editors”.

    One person’s junk is another’s treasure though and the web presents one of the greatest opportunities for people to “write on their blank sheet of paper.”

    When asked about what he regretted most about the web, Berners-Lee said “I’d drop the two slashes,” repeating the line from Melbourne the night before.

    At each of his Australian speeches Berners-Lee has paid homage to his mentor at CERN, Mike Sendall. After Sendall passed away, his family found the original proposal for the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which formed the basis for the world wide web.

    “Exciting but vague” was the note Sendall made in the margins of Berners-Lee’s proposal.

    Vague and exciting experiments was what drove people like James Watt and Thomas Edison during earlier periods of the industrial revolution. Tomorrow’s industries are today’s vague and strange ideas.

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  • Necessity, innovation and the birth of the web

    Necessity, innovation and the birth of the web

    The man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee spoke at the launch of the CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship in Sydney yesterday.

    In telling about how the idea the idea of web, or Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), came about Berners-Lee touched on some fundamental truths about innovation in big organisations.

    In the 1990s the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva had thousands of researchers bringing their own computers, it was an early version of what we now call the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.

    “When they used their computers, they used their favourite computer running their favourite operating system. If they didn’t like what was available they wrote the software themselves,” said Tim. “Of course, none of these talked to each other.”

    As a result sharing data was a nightmare as each scientist created documents using their own programs which often didn’t work on their colleagues’ computers.

    Tim had the idea of standard language that would allow researchers to share information easily, although getting projects like this running in large bureaucratic organisations like CERN isn’t easy.

    For getting HTML and the web running in CERN Tim gives credit to his boss, Mike Sendall, who supported him and his idea.

    “If you’re wondering why innovation happens, one of the things is great bosses who let you do things on the side, Mike found an excuse to get a NeXT computer,” remembers Tim. “‘Why don’t you test it with your hypertext program?’ Mike said with a wink.”

    There’s much talk about innovation in organisations, but without management support those ideas go nowhere, the story of the web is possibly the best example of what can happen when executives don’t just expect their workers to clock in, shut up and watch the clock.

    One key point Tim made in his presentation was that it was twenty years after the Internet was invented before the web came along and another five years until the online world really took off.

    We’re at that stage of development with the web now and with the development of the new HTML5 standard we’re going to see far more communication between machines.

    Berners-Lee says “instead of having 1011 web pages communicating, we start to have 1011 computers talking to each other.”

    These connections mean online innovation is only just beginning, we haven’t seen anything yet.

    If you want your staff to stay quiet and watch the clock, that’s fine. But your clock might be figuring out how to do your job better than you can.

    Tim Berners-Lee image courtesy of Tanaka on Flickr

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