The web: from universal communication space to commercial marketplace

“ Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others. The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1990, and wrote in an essay dated April 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. ”

“ And so, in 1989, he came up with the World Wide Web, developed the standards that made it work, and built the first web browser and web server.
The power of the browser was its flexibility (or, in law professor Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase, its “generative nature”) . Just as a general-purpose computer allowed you to run any program, from a music player to a graphing calculator, the web browser let you view any kind of document. A book, a physics paper, or photos of cats with funny captions—the web browser doesn’t care; it displays whatever the server provides it with. ”

“ The Internet, as World Wide Web, e-mail medium, data exchange, or chat forum effectively overrides constraints and limitations resulting from the participation of language in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more and more a world of efficiency and interconnected activities that take place at a speed and at a variety of levels for which literacy is not appropriate. ”

“ The internet got its first boost with the invention of the web and its hyperlinks by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in 1990, and a second boost with the invention of the first browser Mosaic in 1993. The internet could now be used by anyone, and not only by computer literate people. There were 100 million internet users in December 1997, with one million new users per month, and 300 million internet users in December 2000. In summer 2000, the number of non-English-speaking users reached the number of English-speaking users, with a percentage of 50-50. ”

“ Back in 1992, however, the World Wide Web was a fraction of its present size, and programmers had yet to release easy, graphically oriented browsers such as Mosaic that would help tame the Web. Even more than today, people needed books to fathom the Net. And yet no popular-level guide was in print. So it was entirely fitting that when Fillmore decided to create a book from scratch—rather than just produce it for a publisher—the Internet was the subject. ”

“ The second of the two developments undermining faith in the future was the focus of some of the Millennium Summit’s most anguished debates. The information revolution set off in the closing decade of the century by the invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human activity. ”

“ That's why the software and interfaces developed for the commercial webspace tended to take user's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. The most successful programs, for them, lead people to the 'buy' button and let them use the keyboard only to enter their credit card numbers and nothing else. The internet that grew from these development priorities, dominated by the World Wide Web instead of discussion groups, treats individuals more as consumers than as citizens. ”

“ The World Wide Web, whose rather opaque platform ascended primarily for its ability to serve as an online catalogue, has been adapted to serve many of the internet's original, more technologically primitive functions. ”

“ At one point I was even worried that this “aaronsw” guy, whoever he was, was going to organize, that his organization of his group there was going to threaten the fact that the World Wide Web Consortium, my Consortium, was where all these people would come and do their standards because he seemed to be such a good organizer.
He joined a working group which was doing work on the Semantic Web, the RDF Working Group. At one point this group, which normally met only online, was going to have a rare face-to-face meeting. Normally, everything happens online – we share code, ideas, hopes and dreams. ”

“ Aaron was a huge, magnificent person. I suppose when people talk of a meteoric career you can think of a meteor as something amazing and bright. Also, alas, as something short. A spark, that in Aaron’s case is out - but what an incredible spark he was! Blazing across the dark sky of ordinary people, broken systems, a shining force for good, a maker of great things.
I first came across him online in the hacker community. I mean “hacker” in the most positive way the technical community does, someone who can do stuff, build stuff, with computers. ”

“ He knew that by writing code that was one way of changing the world. You could change the world directly by giving somebody a hug. You could write a piece of code that would make life easy for a whole lot of people. You could build a website which would make it easier for people to communicate, to work together.
And as he worked on projects in the connected world, Aaron realized that a great waste, a great missed opportunity. He realized that sitting on a lot of government computers was a lot of information which in principle anyone should be allowed access to and in practice they were not. ”

“ We’ve lost somebody who put huge energy into righting wrongs. There are people around the world who take it on themselves to just try to fix the world but very few of them do it 24/7 like Aaron. Very few of them are as dedicated. So of the people who are fighting for right, and what he was doing up to the end was fighting for right, we have lost one of our own. So, yes, Taren, we need to all work together, and if we put all our energy together, maybe we can to some small extent, compensate for the loss of Aaron. ”

“ In the end, however, computer networks will make the press better informed, not worse. Via Lycos, for example, a searching tool on the Web, I can track down files written by just the right person to interview or find background information that someone archived from the relevant newsgroup. Besides, who says that all interviews are confrontational? Often e-mail is just right, and I can always use the telephone to fill in gaps. “I used to ask, ‘What’s your fax number?’ at the end of a phone interview,” says a magazine writer named Peggy Noonan. ”

“ Obscure writers, however, found the fan mail from the Internet to be more helpful. In that way the Net was a friend of diversity.
Smaller publishers were also growing more comfortable with the Internet. Bookport, a California-based service, let them post their books on the World Wide Web for Netfolks to read page by page. Alas, a customer could not obtain a whole e-book at once. The idea, of course, was to discourage piracy. I disliked the idea of pay-per-read prevailing; the library model would make books much more popular among the young and actually help good publishers. ”

“ What’s more, unlike paper catalogues, Lilienfeld could update his electronic catalogue to change prices or play up the fastest-selling merchandise.
The World Wide Web was the main way to put White Rabbit on the Internet. Once merchants on the Net would have favored a service called Gopher (as in “go-fer-it”) in honor of the mascot at the University of Minnesota. Gopher displayed text very well and needed less bandwidth on the Net than the Web did. But it lacked the pizzazz of the Web-Mosaic combination; that is, the ability to conjure up pictures and even sound so easily. ”

“ The World Wide Web was also a virtual home for thousands of more conventional businesses such as the manufacturer of a toy gun that shot Ping-Pong balls, a city’s worth of bookstores, Godiva chocolate, and Ragu spaghetti. None other than the Home Shopping Network bought out a Net retailer specializing in computer equipment. Pizza Hut went online. And the United States was hardly alone in this trend. The Singaporeans were competing in the cyberpizza race—Shakey’s Pizza was girding to take orders, via a fax-Net link, from hungry scientists and students at the National University of Singapore. ”

“ The challenge is simply to avoid letting the hardsellers overwhelm the Internet. Countless areas of the Net exist where people not only tolerate ads, they want to read them. Besides, the commercial and noncommercial can build on each other. When I put my TeleRead proposal on the World Wide Web—that is, my call for a well-stocked national digital library with copyrighted books included—I built in hypertext links [1.11] to 25Web sites that could be useful. ”

“ Many firms now post on the Internet data sheets for all their products, and a number of Web sites offer searchable databases. Some manufacturers use disclosure as a competitive tool, offering their customers more information than OSHA requires, including guidance on how to comply with disclosure requirements, training materials, and experts to assist customers. ”

“ Suppose that Netscape joined Microsoft or credit card companies to build in special, billing-related features that users of other browsers couldn’t use?
Netscape, however, seemed benign so far, and the browser’s technical wizardrywizardry was winning many friends. With a click of the mouse, for example, you could scoot smoothly from the Web to the usual newsgroups, and Bob Lilienfeld took advantage of this. He set up his computer system so that customers with the proper software could whiz directly from White Rabbit to child-related newsgroups. ”