Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Launches Blog

Posted on December 21, 2005

The Syndney Morning Herald reports that Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the creator of the Internet, has started a tech blog called Timbl's Blog. The Syndney Morning Herald says Berners-Lee was the first to propose the idea of the Internet: "Berners-Lee first proposed the web in 1989 while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research."

Timbl's very first post has already received over 450 comments. There were so many comments that they had to turn them off.

Oops! Thanks for all the wonderful welcoming comments. We've had rather a lot, and had to turn the comments off on the first blog. I can't answer them all, but I would point out one thing. I just played my part. I built on the work of others -- the Internet, invented 20 years before the web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext, a word coined by Ted Nelson for an idea of links which was already implemented in many non-networked systems. I just put these technologies together. And then, it all took off because of this amazing community of enthusiasts, who have done such incredible things with the technology, and are still advancing it in so many ways.

Berners-Lee has spoken favorably of the blogs in the past. In August he told the BBC that blogging was closer to the original idea of the Internet and the "read/write web."

Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
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.

We are glad he approves of blogging. Blogs do make the web much more creative and conversational. We are also glad he is blogging so we can read what he has to say on technology and other issues.

Update: Berners-Lee is now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His blog can now be found on Medium. You can also find Berners-Lee on Twitter, @timberners_lee.