Rating:  - How to make an important achievement sound dull
Everywhere you go to day it is www this and dot com that. Tim Berners-Lee needs to be heartily congratualted for having the vision and persistence that has resulted in what we have today and where we will all be going tomorrow. Then why has he produced such a disappointing work? The way he describes his early days developing his enquire programme and then his move onto HTML should be enthralling, a story we should want to be telling our grandchildren, but he never stays in one place long enough and he is very dismissive of key events (such as Andreeson's development of mosaic, and the birth of Netscape).
Nevertheless, I now understand a little more about XML, PKC and the 4 horizontal levels of the web's infrastructure and I have a much clearer picture of where Berners-Lee wanted to go with the web, and that is my biggest issue with this work.
Berners-Lee's parents were mathematicians and he is a phyicist. What an orderly world he must be trying to live in. One where the interconnection provided by the web will lead to us all opening up to each other and sharing knowledge. No, the real world is full of bias, inconsistency and greed and no amount of connectivity is going to change that. His thoughts about a semantic web are visionary, machine interpretable data and heuristic searches will certainly mean that finding knowledge will be easier, but for whom? The powerful, or the powerless?
I think he has spent too much time with his friend Micheal Dertouzos - who also put in some humanistic, semi-religious nonsense at the end of his marvellous book "What will be". All I can say to both of them is: "You are infinitely more intelligent than most of us will ever be. Please use that intelligence to develop technology and not to dabble in sociology."
If you have read Kurzweil's book on "Spiritual Machines", you may have noticed a chilling similarity. If intelligence is all life is about and the fight against entropy is the absolute meaning of life, instead of humans becoming more machine like in order to increase the level of intelligence in the world (Kurzweil), all they need to do is create an artificial brain where each individual and their PC is a synapse and their links (cable, satellite, whatever) an axon or a dendrite. Now wouldn't that be spooky!
Rating:  - An important work - but a snoozer in presentation
I bought this book based on recommendations from colleagues and academics who've referenced it. I accept the importance of the author and his account of developing the web. However, I find the presentation unreadable - despite trying hard, I was never able to drudge through the techno-babble and self-aggrandizing to get to the punchline. Possibly interesting for history buffs and those immersed in the internet, but not particularly useful or revealing for others.
Rating:  - How to Trace WWW Origins.
I work with the web all the time. It was insightful to read about how the web got started. I have to thank Tim Berners-Lee for spelling it out.
Rating: - Weaving the Web
Weaving the Web : The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by it's Inventor Tim Berners-Lee is a must read for tech investors. I read it based on George Gilder's recommendation. It is a technology book, not an investment book, but if you want be a successful tech investor you need to do the work. Perhaps work is a bad choice of words; reading this was a joy.
Rating: - A must read for anyone interested in the Web
This is an amazing account of how the Web came to be by the man who pulled together the ideas of many others to create it. Considering how much his invention has changed the world, he is incredibly humble in telling his story. Very easy and fast read. Also provides a good background knowledge of the technical side for those interested in creating for the Web. Which, as he states over and over again, was one of the main reasons he created it; so people from anywhere, no matter who they were, could reach other people and share information. I found the technical information very easily absorbed and easy to understand. But I want to point out this is NOT a techy, how-to manual, full of jargon. Merely one man's story and an overview of the technology and ideas surrounding him. Highly recommend to anyone.
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