13 March 2009

Another bonus of inventing the World Wide Web ...

Today, CERN's been throwing a party to celebrate the 20th birthday of the web -- which they date to the now-famous memo that Tim Berners-Lee wrote to his boss, sketching out a framework for a document-sharing system. As they tell it:

Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.

A panel of speakers and dignitaries marked the event with a short symposium, after which Sir Tim and a few others took a private tour of the ATLAS cavern, part of the Large Hadron Collider. Sir Tim is at left, dwarfed by the massive project. (Learn more about what happens at ATLAS by watching Brian Cox's TEDTalk.)

CERN has built out a helpful website celebrating the web's birthday -- including a look at the very first web site and web server, at info.cern.ch. The site now contains a pocket history of the web, including a photo of the very first web surfer, Robert Cailliau.

Berners-Lee spoke at the celebration today, sharing his vision for the next rev of the Web -- one in which data is as open and exchangeable as words and images are on the current Web. Watch his TEDTalk to get the inspiring details >>

Photo: CERN

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13 March 2009

The next Web of open, linked data: Tim Berners-Lee on TED.com

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009 in Long Beach, California. Duration: 16:23.)

Watch Tim Berners-Lee's talk from TED2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks -- including more talks about what's next in tech.

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13 March 2009

Scientific American on the day the Web was born

For some more background on why today's TEDTalk is especially appropriate today, read Scientific American's thorough and fascinating look at the birth of the web.

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