Nigel's week 1 links

When clicking on all the links and reading the blogs which Nigel provided for us in week 1, I was slightly intimidated by the whole "blogging thing". People like John Naughton ("Harry's war"), Tony Hurst ("techy") and Tim Berners-Lee obviously made it their common practice to post their thoughts online. This was something fairly new to me since I am a rather private person and tend to keep my thoughts to myself.
However, when reading all their blogs, I got more and more used to the idea of "blogging".

One blog I particularly enjoyed was the one of Tim Berners- Lee "Giant Global Graph"
in which he states "The word Web we normally use as short for World Wide Web. The WWW increases the power we have as users again. The realization was "It isn't the computers, but the documents which are interesting". Now you could browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on. Simpler, more powerful. Obvious, really."

This thought feeds directly into the Larry Lessig video which I posted a few weeks ago which outlines the shift from "read-write" culture to "read only" culture and describes how internet and digitalisation give tools of creation to young people which they can use to re-create their culture.

Tim Lee Berners also addresses the unexpected re-use of the same documents for entirely different reasons. According to Tim Lee Berners "Two delights drove the Web: one of being told by a stranger your Web page has saved their day, and the other of discovering just the information you need and for which you couldn't imagine someone having actually had the motivation to provide it. So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents.Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Obvious, really.""

I am not quite sure that the average user has come to the same realization as Tim Lee Berners yet but considering the impact the internet has on culture and thought systems right now, I really hope that people will come to that "realization" very soon so that they will focus on the "topics and content" of the documents which the web links together rather than on the documents themselves.