News Blog

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Though the favorite metaphor to describe the Web has long been a highway, or for some, a "series of tubes," the man credited with inventing it all thinks of the Web more like the human mind.

"Lots of people are doing research around the Web...and there are interesting results, but a lack of a core curriculum in the universities," Tim Berners-Lee told a gathering of scientists at HP Labs and other Silicon Valley executives here. "I've been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) Web sites. The brain we study as a complex system." So why not the Web?

What millions of Internet users take for granted every day--using the Web as a means to download movies, read the news, or check Facebook--will look drastically different five years from now, and that calls for study of it as a science, according to Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the Web Science Research Initiative . Launched a year ago, WSRI is a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Southampton in England, and is encouraging the study of both the social and technological implications of wide-scale use of the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee and Wendy Hall of WSRI visited HP Labs in Palo Alto.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)

On a tour to encourage the adoption of Web science as a course of study at local universities, Berners-Lee spoke about what kind of challenges the increasingly social Web presents. Corralling the information about us out on the Web, identifying where it came from and who is allowed access to it are major issues that come up every day. Facebook's decision to combine user profiles with advertising is just one example.

But there are even more serious implications of a Web that is a growing collection of our personal information. Who owns it? And how do we determine how our information is used?

One example Berners-Lee gave is hospital records. It's still unclear how to be sure that doctors can have access to patient information to identify and treat you, but at the same time keep that information hidden from, say, your employer. There is no answer yet. "It's about building systems and understanding where data is coming from," he said. And though that will take time to come up with a new way of storing and organizing information on the Web, he and others are already working on it.

Phishing scams, spam, an overload of our current Web infrastructure, as well as the democracy of online communities, are each major ideas that need to be looked at with an academic eye, said Berners-Lee, rather than from a closed, proprietary, or corporate perspective. Berners-Lee has long advocated a universal and open Internet, and is one of the founders of the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that supports open Web standards.

Though much of the future of the Web is wide open, one thing that will happen is that we won't be inputting our personal information into separate social networks, he said. In other words, we'll have one profile that compiles all information related to us and our social networks. "Right now, so many people are complaining that they have told one Web site who their friends are, and another one who their friends are...In five years time, I hope people will be programming not at the document level, but at the application level," he said. "You will have something which is an application which is consistent for looking at different aspects of people. It (will use) your role as their friend for putting together a very powerful, all-encompassing view of them (online)."

Microsoft and open-source site SourceForge plan to offer a free plug-in early next year that will convert Office 2007 files to the Daisy format, which translates text to speech.

The free tool will add a "Save as Daisy" option within Word 2007 and 2003. Daisy, or Digital Accessible Information System, XML files can be "read" aloud by speech synthesizers, paired with audio narration, and used to create electronic Braille. Users can navigate open-standard Daisy documents quickly by jumping between page elements such as headers and indexes.

The Daisy Consortium of 70 nonprofits has aimed since 1996 to make all published information available to people with visual impairments and learning disabilities.

Digital narration serves computer users with visual impairments, people with learning challenges like dyslexia, as well as those with Parkinson's disease and other conditions that make it hard to type or hold a book.

With the release of the Office 2007 suite in January, Microsoft shunned the popular, XML-based OpenDocument Format for its own, new Office Open XML format. The OOXML documents, which include Word files with the DOCX extension, are easier to retrieve, if corrupted, than older DOC files.

Versions of Word prior to 2007 can open OOXML documents after a one-time download of a free converter from Microsoft. However, critics gripe that Microsoft's format change was unnecessary and clumsy. Microsoft maintains that the new format enables greater flexibility, such as accessibility features.

(See also accessibility in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.)

The World Wide Web Consortium, which purports to be an "open forum" for standards discussion, doesn't exactly live up to its own claims.

Earlier on Monday, the W3C barred one of my colleagues, News.com reporter Anne Broache, from attending a "Toward More Transparent Government" conference held, ironically, in a government building in Washington, D.C.

W3C's Danny Weitzner, who claims 'public' actually means 'not public'

The conference Web site clearly says: "Conversations and results are public."

But Danny Weitzner, one of the W3C's policy directors and event co-chair, repeatedly claimed in a followup telephone conversation that, by "public," the W3C actually means "closed to the public." Weitzner was the person who personally barred my colleague from entering the conference.

"There was clearly some ambiguity," Weitzner said. "We recognize that the (call for participation) could have been more clear." He said that News.com was not being singled out and another reporter who telephoned was also rejected.

Weitzner, a lawyer and Washington insider before moving to the W3C, said making an event discussing government transparency less transparent was necessary because government officials could then speak more freely "without wondering how the press would interpret what they have to say."

"There are times when in order to have an open exchange of ideas, you need to provide an off-the-record environment, which is what we did," Weitzner said. He was, however, unable to identify any government officials who attended the event who might feel stifled.

The event also featured a keynote speech by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee on the topic of "Widescale data integration: opportunities and challenges."

When asked whether Berners-Lee, hardly reticent about expressing his opinions on this topic, would be opposed to media coverage, Weitzner replied: "The purpose of his event was not to publicize his views."

It's true that the W3C has the right to close its meetings, of course, though we wonder about about the propriety of doing it when a federal building is the venue. The W3C event was held at the National Academy of Sciences, created by an act of Congress in 1863 and funded primarily by federal tax dollars.

The bigger question is whether it's wise for a standards body that supposedly prides itself on openness -- and providing an alternative to proprietary, secretive organizations -- to bar the press from covering, on behalf of our readers, events that are listed as "public" on its own Web site. (It's not like these are confidential discussions about W3C staff salaries or anything, after all, and the Internet Engineering Task Force allows reporters into its working group sessions.)

This week's event at the National Academy of Sciences certainly seems newsworthy. Beyond Berners-Lee's keynote, there also were position papers submitted by Google, Red Hat, the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.S. General Services Administration, and the U.K. Office of Public Sector Information.

The Web site says that "W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the Workshop" -- it doesn't mention any fees nor were we asked to pay any. News.com didn't register in advance, it's true, but Weitzner claimed that we would have been barred anyway.

The odd thing is that before we heard back from Weitzner, we talked to W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly, who said "I can't apologize enough" for the confusion and added, for good measure, "I'm very sorry."

"I think if I had been in DC, I probably would have said, 'Geez, why can't we have her in here?'" Daly said, referring to my colleague who got the boot.

Kudos to her: at least someone at the W3C seems to favor transparency in an official event about, ah, transparency. Unfortunately Weitzner, who gets to make these decisions, doesn't seem to have figured that out.