Mark Lawson — a few months ago he read about three blogs and said that blogging is “leftwing” — has interviewed Tim Berners-Lee. He’s only the inventor of the WWW you know.
Mark Lawson: …I’m interested that at what sense you began to sense the possibilities [of the WWW]… you weren’t thinking blogging, I assume.
Tim Berners-Lee: 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.