Christopher Lydon interviewed with Tim Berners-Lee last week.#

The interview is very interesting, and Chris' teaser gives a great peek at how it goes:

The Web is not, first, what Tim Berners-Lee thought he was designing in the early '90s: a collaborative medium for researchers working together at a distance. That part, for a variety of technical and legal reasons, just didn't work. Neither is the Web a superhighway of anything, if the highway motif makes you think of concrete, steel, and fixed routes to anywhere. The Web is not, and must never be, the avenue of a monoculture. It is not the outline of a universal brain that will reduce human beings to mere neurons in a Global Mind. It is not a monument to the "Me Decade." That is, it's not all about expressive blogging. Or rather: it's equally about listening and learning. It is about them as much as it's about us. It is not, he insists, a structure. It is not an active agent--even as it kicks into the cultural and political life of the United States in the presidential decision year of 2004.

I find it interesting how very hands-off Tim Berners-Lee is and intent on making sure no one will compare him to Al Gore or someone interested in turning a medium into a power structure.

When Chris asks about how the Web is changing politics and interactions between people, Tim says:

Let's not say the Web is changing these things. Society is doing it. People are changing the world, and they may be using the Web to do it. We shouldn't "tune" the Web for a particular structure.

Which leads to a discussion about what the Web was originally to do as TBL at first conceived it:

The idea was that hypertext would be a way of working together where a trace would be created that others could follow.

One that he seems to be very interested in is using the Web in a true read/write way--being able to annotate any resource you come across.

Talkback is a poor man's annotation system. We want a more comprehensive system in the future.

[...]

Love to see people use the web to hold people accountable... like adding annotations.

I think this is a fantastic vision as well. But there are some problems with it as it has been implemented so far: You can't directly annotate, independent of another person.

It seems to me there are 4 strategies for annotation today:

1. Not allowing people to annotate your work. (The dominate way, like #2 but you never link anything.)
2. Personally screening annotations and then providing links to then. (When I write about your page and then email you about it. And if you don't link me, there's always Technorati.)
3. TrackBack
4. Comments. (Problems: You can delete comments and they dilute the annotator's internet presence.)

The problem with TrackBack and Comments that personal screening solves is that of spam. How do you know where it's really a quality annotation?

I think that the goal of Annotea is to solve this problem and have reputations of annotators and annotation servers. Now, if only more web browsers would turn into web clients, like Amaya.

An interesting comment that he makes is about the potential for information overload that the Web exposes us to:

Some people wonder that if because the web allows them to read anything, does that they should read everything?

And then ties this to the vision of a grand participatory democracy:

We can't completely participate, but we can shift the balance between delegation and participation.

Basically, because we have to have real lives we can't all sit around being participants in a democracy all the time. At some point you need to delegate.

Richard MacManus writes about this interview as well.#

When Lydon asked him why he created the Web back in the late 80's/early 90's, Berners-Lee said he felt there was "a need to write where you can read". He initially designed it to be a "collaborative medium", but it's real impact has been as a "publication medium". A word he used a few times was "annotate" and one point in particular stood out here: that we should be able to annotate the Web in order to "make people accountable". TBL used the example of US politics, which he felt needed to improve its accountability. He suggested that the Web could enable the public to annotate what public figures say and evolve discussions around that. This reminded me of the W3C's read/write web browser, Amaya, which I've blogged about in the past. Amaya is one of the great missed opportunities of the Web, IMHO. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has roughly 95% of the market, yet it can only read Web content - it can't be used towrite it.

And:

My favourite part of the TBL interview was when he said that blogging *should* be two-way. One should express oneself (=WRITE), but also listen to feedback (=READ). Berners-Lee thought that blogging has done exceedingly well to provide mechanisms for gathering and listening to feedback. But he wants people on the Web in general (and I'm hereby employing this concept to blogging specifically) to make a conscious effort to not constrain themselves to a rose-coloured view of the world. That is, don't become trapped in a self-reinforcing social group, that only links to and reads content belonging to other members of your group. Listen to other bloggers, listen to *all* the blogosphere.