Video: Inside the Semantic Web with Sir Tim Berners-Lee

ZDNet's David Berlind got some time with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Topics covered include the Semantic Web (see also: Microformats), mashups, and the benefits of open standards versus proprietary development environments such as Flash and Silverlight.

"We wouldn't have had the Web," Berners-Lee says, had it started as bunch of competing solutions. And as the mobile Web gains momentum, with its closed access devices (mobile phones), we're in danger of a platform fragmentation that could put a damper on innovation. "We must keep an open interface platform. The important thing is that the standards are royalty-free." Play the video for the whole story.

[blablupp]

how appropriate- sponsored by Microsoft

How appropriate is it that the video about TBL and the importance of standards on the web is sponsored by Microsoft, that bastion of open standards on the web.

[fun2program8]

It changes

Every time someone else plays the movie, it changes, in case you didn't know.

Still kind of ironic.

[fire1fl]

Thanks AT&T

for being another of the sponsors. Yes, MS and ATT probably have designs on WEB 3.0. However, I'm appreciative for the webcast anyway. The conversation here was informative about how the web is morphing into an AI machine.

[lodave]

Now Wait a Second Here! Who Invented What?

Weren't we all told a couple of elections ago that
AL GORE had invented the internet? What kind of
disinformation is being spread around here? 8^O

[widemanf]

So you beleive everything

So you beleive everything that comes out of a politician's mouth?!?!?

Let's remember that it was an election year!!

[Trevorkew]

Repo disinformation

[athrillofhope]

There's no money in that, so he went on to ...

... invent "global warming" because he's poised to make $$$ on 'green-technologies.' His "inconvenient truth" is actually riddled with outright lies. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f8v5du5_ag Also see: http://www.hebookservice.com/products/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=c7022

Funny. In the mid 1970s, the "big scare" was global COOLING? Another ice age coming--remember? Oops! Americans still continued having happy lives. Darn! So let's try "global WARMING!" Hmmm ... seems to be working. No science to it. But it gets votes, gives the French something to yell at Americans about, and, most importantly, turns Al Gore (like Jimmy Carter) from a sore loser into a "misunderstood philanthropist."

[Rick3904]

Setting the Record Straight

The Internet was actually invented in about 1969 by a branch of the US Defense Department called ARPA (now known as DARPA). The internet was first known as ARPANET.

The Al Gore connection comes from a speech he made some time back where he said something about sponsoring the legislation to create the internet. Somehow that turned into "Al Gore invented the internet". Undoubtedly, being the politician he is, he worded the statement to take more credit that he was likely due.

Where Sir Tim Berners-Lee comes in is that he invented the World Wide Web (WWW), which we think of as the same thing as the internet. The WWW was invented in 1991. That has more to do with the browser/weblink interface than the internet itself.