Leading the list of the most influential person in technology in the last 150 years is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web (last year he was named one of the top minds by Time magazine). This new list was just released late last week. Imagine -he only implemented his idea 18 years ago. The fact that he led the list didn't surprise me at all. What did surprise me was other famous tech people were ranked lower, such as Bill Gates (#31) and Steve Jobs (#14) and Jeff Bezos (#34). Look at the top 10 (Intel's founders are in the top 10 -- but hey - Intel pulled the panel together to come up with this list):
1. Tim Berners-Lee – Founder of the modern-day World Wide Web
2. Sergey Brin – Co-founder of Google
3. Larry Page – Co-founder of Google
4. Guglielmo Marconi – Inventor of the Radiotelegraph system
5. Jack Kilby – Inventor of the Integrated Circuit and Calculator
6. Gordon Moore – Co-founder of Intel (but I know of him from Moore's Law)
7. Alan Turing – played a major role in deciphering German Code in WWII
8. Robert Noyce – Co-founder of Intel
9. William Shockley – Co-Inventor of the Transistor
10. Don Estridge – Led the development of the IBM computer
Here's the full list.
A must-read is Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, published in 1997. I read it two years ago and it still sticks with me. As the son of mathematicians who invented an early prototype of the computer, and with background in Physics at Oxford, you would think his book would be too technical but it isn't. It is highly readable and interesting for the visionary and philosophical approach. He is one of the greatest minds of our time. The full impact of his vision has only begun to be realized. Already he has altered our way of thinking, knowing, and socializing.
What kind of computer does he use? At last report, a Mac with the OSX operating system. (Mac web share was 7.6% in January.) He is just over 50 and has been awarded, in the last few years, a ton of honors, awards and degrees. He's now officially Sir Timothy Berners-Lee OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA
His vision of the future is most interesting. More on the flip.
Berner's Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), is working on his latest project -- the Semantic Web which he envisions as a universal medium for exchanging data, information and knowledge.
He has grappled with how to describe his visionary philosophy of the future. First he named it the Semantic Web. Early last year he thought that calling it the Data Web would have been simpler. After all, he named his first idea the World Wide Web and got in trouble for calling it the www. Now he's struggling to articulate his vision and his latest term for it is The Graph which is very simple, he says, as it is all about the relationship between things.
He explains the Semantic Web in late 2007, which he thinks should be been named the Giant Global Graph (GGG). It has to do with how we socially connect to each other.
His latest thinking, takes the Net (short for Internet - International Information structure - III) which Al Gore promoted, linking computers to each other, and the Web (World Wide Web) and shaping both as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents. It isn't the documents that are important, but the things they are about and the relationships between the data.
"I am hoping that, increasingly, people see the relationships between the "Document Web" and the "Data Web" as mutually inclusive and thereby symbiotic."
It is connecting and integrating data across silos -- a term that corporate leaders are coming to understand. I've written before about rhizomatic structures - the theory of how we are shifting to understand our world and relationships and how they differ from the "silo" and top-down information structure we've learned.
His thinking is hard to envision because it is such a paradigm shift. BusinessWeek interviewed him last year on this idea of the Semantic Web. "The Semantic Web, as Berners-Lee envisions it, represents a change so profound that it's not always easy for others to grasp. This isn't the first time he's encountered that problem. "It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page," Berners-Lee says.
In recent testimony before a Congressional committee on Telecommunications and the Internet, he reiterated the vision of social connectedness: As a Federal judge said in defense of freedom of expression on the Internet, "The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation."
So I'm bemoaning the drop in Google stock as I see and understand his vision and see Apple and Google best poised to move forward into this brave new world. Portals of access and search mechanisms for linking this data? Microsoft's $44.6 billion acquisition of Yahoo! will probably be approved. The House Judiciary's antitrust task force meets on February 8 to discuss the merger. Google has 56.3.% of the search market (and an estimated $42% of the online ad dollars) compared for 31.5% for Microsoft and Yahoo's web searches. The first official Google response to Microsoft's action to intensify its presence in this area: "Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?" Now Google is looking to work with Yahoo... This is a modern day Waterloo battle...
The FTC's approval of Google's purchase of DoubleClick makes Microsoft's $6 billion purchase of aQuantive, an ad network, likely to be approved as well. Thus the search and advertising competition will narrow to these conglomerates:Google/Doubleclick and Microsoft/Yahoo!/aQuantive.
The Mobile Web: Berners-Lee is also working as well on the Mobile Web -- a convergence of the Web with mobile devices. The W3C's Mobile Web Inititiave (MWI) is setting standards for mobile devices in the way that Berner's Lee helped shape standards for web/data access and integration. He is against what he terms ceiling technologies -- technologies that, for profit motives, bar access to wide use and innovation, which is something that the mobile phone industry has operated with. Berner's Lee says huge opportunities for humanity depend on open technology. It is why he has been an avid proponent of Net Neutrality and open access.
As he says, "The lesson from the proliferation of new applications and services on top of the Web infrastructure is that innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards, a flexible, scalable architecture, and access to these standards on royalty-free ($0 fee patent licenses) terms."
It is also how the world is becoming flat and free and based on an attention economy, but that is another philosophical/theory discussion.
Tim B-L on privacy and his work at MIT is interesting in light of the current Congressional debates on FISA this week. He says, "These shifts in the way we relate to personal information require serious consideration in many aspects of our social and legal lives. While we are only just beginning to see these shifts, now is the time to examine a range of legal and technical options that will preserve our fundamental privacy values for the future."
Our digital data and information is becoming available not just on desktop or laptop computers but also on large screens and small mobile devices and this shift in digital information will alter us completely and our world in which we live "inasmuch as this new ubiquitous face of the Web is public, it will shape the nature of the public spaces we work, shop, do politics, and socialize in."
Additional related posts:
Ramble: Privacy, Google... I wrote about Google, data mining and how technology is really ahead of how we can plan it, manage it and control it.
Rhizomes: Thinking
Theories of Engaging, Immersing & Linking (part of my graduate new media study project)
When I think about the accomplishments in the virtual world I am astounded. I would never have conceived of, say, a mouse. The concepts behind all of this stuff amazes me.
Posted by: Rhea | February 05, 2008 at 08:05 AM
Where's Al Gore???
(just kidding)
Posted by: magpie | February 05, 2008 at 12:31 PM