When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 his main idea was to share information between people and to communicate in that information space. He also thought of the Web as “a realistic mirror of the ways in which we work and play and socialize” one day. Today, parts of these dreams are our world’s reality. The amount of information available on the WWW and the fact of more and more people using it in their everyday life shows that we already seem to benefit from his ideas.

Recently, Tim Berners-Lee talked about his view of Web 2.0 in an interview at the IBM Podcast channel Developer Works. When being asked how he would see Web 2.0, he is rather critical about this new hype: “…I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what IT means. If Web 2.0 for you is Blogs and Wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, this Web 2.0 means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0.”

During the interview, Tim Berners-Lee points out his definition of the World Wide Web: “…the idea of the Web as interaction between people is really what the Web is. That was what it was designed to be as a collaborative space where people can interact.” He still remarks that some of the new applications are useful and make it easier for everyone to share their thoughts.

What is currently drawing a lot more of Tim Berners-Lees attention is the Semantic Web, the so-called next generation web. He is part of the team which is working on a medium that is able to supplement or even replace the content of Web documents. The father of the World Wide Web is convinced that the Semantic Web will grow exponential and lead to many new inventions in the future.

Further links:
Complete Interview as Text-Document
Complete Interview as Podcast-File