The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, who envisioned an open, universal information system connecting all people. Despite the fact that many attribute to Tim Berner’s Lee the expression the read and write web and that he has been going on it since forever, he is not the one who coined the expression. The phrase “read/write web” in today’s sense first appeared in Edd Dumbill’s blurb for his site writetheweb.com in 2000. In 2001, Dave Winer built a website called The Two Way Web, which articulates a vision of publishing where the “content and the editing environment (are) totally integrated”. Richard MacManus (2003) connected the phrase with Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of an easily and intuitively editable Web. Dan Gillmor then used it as a chapter heading in his We the Media (2004), complete with the quasi-attribution to Berners-Lee. This quasi-attribution got cemented in the title of a BBC interview in which Berners-Lee validated blogs and wikis as forms of web authoring that reflect his original vision. As we can observe, although the trendy commercial term “Web 2.0″, popularized after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004, suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, many of the ideas of “Web 2.0″ had already been featured in implementations on networked systems well before the term “Web 2.0″ emerged. In a podcast interview Tim Berners-Lee described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon.” “Nobody really knows what it means,” he said, and went on to say that “if Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”
Berner’s Lee campaigned straight from the beginning for browser makers to build editors into their software rather than just make browsing clients. He failed getting this wish past the Mosaic people in 1993/94, who came up with the first widely popular Web browser, and from there on out the idea of an editing/browsing client has been a losing proposition. The W3C came out with a proof-of-concept browser named Amaya, but the W3C has always been funded by big Internet companies such as Microsoft and Netscape –so it couldn’t possibly compete in the browser market with its own financial backers. Almost twenty years after he invented the Web, Tim Berners-Lee is now leading the effort to create the World Wide Web Foundation (”Web Foundation”) as the next phase of fulfilling his original vision: the Web as humanity connected by technology. The mission of the Foundation is:
to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
The Web Foundation is currently developing plans to fund projects around the world through these strategically integrated programs:
Web Science and Research Web Technology and Practice Web for Society
Tim Berner’s Lee, one of the VIP guest invited by the FLOSS community, launches the Campus Party Brasil event on Monday, January 19th and a plenary session on the Semantic Web (dubbed Web 3.0) is scheduled for Tuesday 20th.