Tim Berners-Lee, credited with the invention of the Internet, just launched a blog. His thoughts on how Internet publishing has progressed are interesting.
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn’t demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.
Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space. In the mean time, I have had the luxury of having a web site which I have write access, and I’ve used tools like Amaya and Nvu which allow direct editing of web pages. With these, I haven’t felt the urge to blog with blogging tools. Effectively my blog has been the Design Issues series of technical articles.
That said, it is nice to have a machine to the administrative work of handling the navigation bars and comment buttons and so on, and it is nice to edit in a mode in which you can to limited damage to the site. So I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools. So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog.
Not bad for the first day – over 338 comments and growing.