Perhaps it was the fact that we are meeting Sir Tim Berners-Lee soon that at last prompted me to read “Weaving the Web” (combined with the fact that a plane journey is a good time for reading), but in any case I managed to read this book on my flight from Shannon to Boston on Tuesday.

It’s a wonderful story of how the visionary efforts of one and then a few like-minded souls can leverage many, many others towards an amazing vision in a relatively short period of time. The Web is still just a teenager, but it must be marked in dog years squared or something because it is so much more than I’m sure even Tim himself could have imagined it would be 17 years ago.

I am usually a fairly slow reader, but I just seemed to get into a flow reading this book and during that I marked out some parts of interest to today’s Web and some of the work that I am involved in. There’s also a lot of prescient stuff, for example, the browser / editor systems he describes are like today’s blogs, the annotation services are like del.icio.us, and the collaborative tools are our wikis. I’d like to quote / paraphrase some parts and comment briefly on them (maybe this will be interesting for you readers, maybe not). [Let me also say that while these are just some things that personally interest me, if they resonate with you I'd advise you to get the book and find out what other ideas may form...]

Connecting disparate things, like discussions and pages

“I had to show how this system could integrate very disparate things, so I provided an example of an Internet newsgroup message, and a page from my old Enquire program.”

“All [W3C] mail is instantly archived to the Web with a persistent URI.”

Years later and this is still so relevant. It’s an aim of SIOC to integrate data from Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists and of course other discussions with any other relevant pages on the Web. And some more related thoughts, if you can imagine full histories of communities of interest and their discussions being semantically described…

“When new people joined a group they would have the legacy of decisions and reasons available for inspection. When people left the group their work would already have been captured and integrated. As an exciting bonus, machine analysis of the web of knowledge could perhaps allow the participants to draw conclusions about management and organisation of their collective activity that they would not otherwise have elucidated.”

And by describing exactly who says what (expert finding), another problem is solved:

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