Rating:  - An excelent book about the web history and future.
This is a great book. It explains in details how the web concept evolved. I think Tim Berners-Lee couldn't tell it better. Personally, I'd never realized how such subject emerged just in a high-energy physics lab. Tim in Weaving The Web helped me to understand that. It's clear that there was no Eureka moment. The Web came from a set of rambling thoughts. Beyond history facts Tim gives us the possibility of getting the Web from a social perspective. Further, there is a interesting and curious discussion about its future. I recommend it strongly.
Rating:  - If ever a man deserved a royalty check...
As one of the millions of people whose lives have changed for the better as a result of Berners-Lee's invention, I was more than happy to do my part to pad the man's checking account.
Ever since Berners-Lee wrote and released the first public versions of his CERN Web server and browser programs in the early 90s, he has watched his brainchild evolve and mushroom into a world-changing technology. What's remarkable about Berners-Lee is that in the ensuing era of crazed wealth creation, he has consistently resisted opportunities to cash in, electing instead to play a statesmanlike role as chairman of the non-profit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international body that governs (or at least attempts to govern) Web standards and ensure that the Web remains a level playing field with open standards, indomitable by any one company.
Berners-Lee begins his tale recounting his earliest experiments with hypertext information retrieval systems at CERN, the Swiss particle physics laboratory. He describes an early prototype application called Enquire which was, alas, lost forever as the result of a calamitous diskette mix-up in the early 80s (one can't help but wonder how things might have played out had the original program survived). Berners-Lee began work on what become today's World Wide Web in 1989, finally releasing his first Web server and browser programs to the public in 1993. And the rest, as they say, well, you know...
Most of the book centers on the seminal early days of the Web in the mid-1990s, when Berners-Lee made the all-important decision to release his code to the public and eventually allow commercialization by young companies like Netscape and Spyglass. He recounts his fateful early meetings with a young Marc Andreessen, and well-told anecdotes of his early struggles to forge the World Wide Web Consortium in the Byzantium of the software industry, wrestling consensus from recalcitrant giants like IBM, Microsoft and Sun.
Berners-Lee talks most passionately about his struggles to maintain standards ? with decidedly mixed success - in the face of growing competitive pressures among consortium members, and the onrush of new Web-centric technologies like Java and XML.
The book closes with a few chapters outlining his vision of a future Web - less dependent on the desktop PC, expanding through increasingly persistent, universal customer access, device independence, and of course continuing evolution in Web standards. Most interesting are his closing ruminations on the unfulfilled aspects of his vision: of a highly collaborative, participatory environment, less driven by the consumerist imperative of the commercial software industry - a Web that might offer users not just the palliative sop of "interactivity," but of more enriching "intercreativity" in the form of interactive and egalitarian environments for collaboration between individuals and organizations.
The book provides a solid accounting of Berners-Lee's life in a straightforward chronological narrative. If at times edging towards self-aggrandizement (it's an autobiography, after all), this book nonetheless affords a rare first-hand glimpse into the early formative days of the Web, as well as a few provocative ideas about what might come next.
Rating: - A Good Read About the Web
I love this quote from Tim Berners-Lee, the man responsible for the World Wide Web. He's a low profile genius who never profited from his invention. I often think about him when i talk to my investment banking friends, or other people who are placing monetary gain over what really makes them happy. This is a quote from his book Weaving the Web which is a pretty good read if you're interested in how the web came about, what the original thoughts were about it, and how it's survived attempts by private industry (Microsoft, IBM, etc.) to control it.
"People have sometimes asked me whether i am upset that i have not made a lot of money from the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take my life. These I would not change - though i am making no comment on what i might do in the future. What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be to some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe. What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person's value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbring was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what i really want to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children's sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy." - Tim Berners-Lee
Rating:  - Thoughts on the web from the man who invented it.
In a recent presidential election, Democrat Al Gore was ridiculed for "claiming" that he invented the Internet. While he was a significant player in the development of the Internet, no one can really claim to have invented it and there is a great deal of dispute over whether Gore ever really made the claim. The situation is quite different for the World Wide Web (WWW). Tim Berners-Lee did invent the WWW and there is no dispute about it. It was his vision of writing hyperlinked documents that began a revolution in human information storage and processing.
This book is less a historical recounting of the events that led to the invention of the web and more about his thoughts when creating it and where it will go. Berners-Lee is quite correct when he is adamant about the lack of control and standards being a precondition for the development of the web. While others were lobbying for the more rigid format of SGML, he kept to the simpler tag structure of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). The simplicity of HTML made it possible for most people to learn how to write web pages and this helped fuel the explosive growth.
In the last part of the book, he discusses what he thinks the web should be become, describing what he calls "the semantic web." This is a web that understands the non-obvious links between different topics. In other words, the web understands the meaning of the data. For example, if you are interested in statistics on breast cancer a search will return data that is truly about breast cancer and not be blocked by a filter because it contains the word "breast." This is a difficult task, although a great deal of progress has been made. A short time ago, most searches using common keywords returned a large number of inappropriate sites because the search engine could be fooled. The situation is much better now, although it is still difficult to determine the quality of the sites returned.
Tim Berners-Lee will probably always be considered the person that could have most profited from the Internet yet chose not to do so. For those reasons, he should be a hero to us all. For, if he had decided to patent his invention and charge even the smallest amount as a licensing fee, he would now be rich enough to buy his own country. He explains that in this book as well.
Rating:  - The web has never been so boring...
Yes, the book is important because of the role that Tim played in creating the web. It has scattered pieces of trivia and background information that I enjoy digging up from these techno-biographies. But let's be honest: this book is a real snooze-fest. It is only engaging in the mildest sense of the term. One must concentrate hard to keep the mind from wandering. There is no color to it.
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