Kerblam! by Christopher

Sunday, November 26
On the importance of hyperlinks and other miscellanea

Tim Berners-Lee, for all intents and purposes the inventor of the WWW, on the importance of hyperlinks:

On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective - like speaking but with a paper bag over your head.
- Tim Berners Lee, in Links and Law: Myths

I really love this quote. I also love how he dismissed the urge for developers and startups to label themselves as "2.0";

Berners-Lee has dismissed Web 2.0 as useless jargon nobody can explain and a set of technology that tries to achieve exactly the same thing as "Web 1.0."

Of course, none of this is new news, but I feel that many people still forget that none of this 2.0 stuff came about by accident. To me, Web 2.0 is just people realising that suddenly, things they were always able to do are now en vogue once more - and if they slap some bevelled edges on everything and add some nice, shiny graphics, bingo: Web 2.0-ified. It's also the realisation that they can peddle these things as real innovations, and rake in the cash from venture capital firms by flogging them as new, clever inventions - and yeah, while some of these things are really innovative, pretty much all of them have been done before in some shape or form, just slightly less elegantly. That's through no fault of their own though, the technology enabling people to realise their ideas has always played catch-up to the ideas themselves for a long, long time.

Don't go mad kids, it's just progress... With a drizzling of paradigm shift for flavour.

Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 11/26/2006 02:43:00 PM. Roughly.
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