| By Jeremy Geelan |
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| August 23, 2006 04:00 AM EDT |
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'Web 1.0 was all about connecting people,' Sir Tim Berners-Lee (pictured) 
says, in a podcast currently available on the IBM developerworks site. 'It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means."
"If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis," Berners-Lee continued, "then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."
The Father of the Web's comments will beyond question be widely listened to and repeated. When on December 12, 2005, his first-ever blog entry saw the light of day on the Web he'd invented, no fewer than 455 comments accumulated within days.
Most of them were adulatory comments designed to make "TBL" aware of how grateful the wider world is for his invention. Which threatened to overwhelm the blogging system of MIT's Decentralized Information Group (DIG), so Berners-Lee in the end disabled the feedback functionality of that inaugural blog, an action he explained with his characteristic modesty:
"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."
He then attempted, with equal courtesy, to emphasize that the aim and scope of his new blog was fully congruent with his newer, Semantic Web, interests - and not so much with his former, W3C life:
"By the way, this blog is at DIG, the Decentralised Information Group at MIT's CSAIL. I intend it to be geeky semantic web stuff mostly. For example, it won't be for W3C questions which should really be addressed to working groups. So thanks for all the support, no need for more general 'thank you' comments! Thank *you* all."
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