Not a new promise.

In a recent interview with the BBC (titled, no less: Berners-Lee on the read/write web), Tim Berners-Lee, inventor (frankly, I've never known whether that's the right word for him) of the World Wide Web spoke about his original vision.

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.

In this view, blogging is basically a personal web site made easy. It's hard to complain about the numerous possibilities for web design that sprang up along with the web. Who, for instance, wasn't enchanted with by the possibilities that flash seemed to offer, and weren't those dynamic HTML pages mouth-watering? But it seemed as though each time those of us with basic personal web sites almost mastered a new tool, or figured out how to achieve a particularly captivating design element, newer tools emerged, and we were eternally, and inevitably, behind the curve in the design of our sites. And form all too often took precedence over content. In this sense, blogs are not only a case of content over form, but also a return to the original promise of the web. Uploading a site became, once again, quick and easy, and people with something to say (and many too many without) were once again able to say it.

Go to: How many prosumers can fit on the head of cyberspace?