I have been intrigued to read a couple of interviews over the past week with Tim Berners Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, and in particular his reported stance on blogging.

In an interview with the BBC entitled Web Inventor fears for the future, Berners Lee was talking about setting up a web science research project to look at the possible implications at a social level of the web’s development. This was also reported in the Guardian Unlimited where the article had a subtitle of “blogging one of biggest perils, says innovator“.

This has been widely reported around the blogosphere as you might imagine, particularly coming from someone as influential as Tim Berners Lee. As I read the pieces, I wondered why blogs were being singled out for particular blame, especially when I felt so encouraged by the self-regulating efforts I saw in operation after the Edelman / Walmart fake blog episode.

I was therefore pleased to see this week on Berners Lee’s own blog, a post entitled Blogging is Great where he comments:

In a recent interview with the Guardian, alas, my attempt to explain this was turned upside down into a “blogging is one of the biggest perils” message. Sigh. I think they took their lead from an unfortunate BBC article, which for some reason stressed concerns about the web rather than excitement, failure modes rather than opportunities.

Feeling rather relieved at this, I looked back over the other articles and noticed that Bobbie Johnson, the author of The Guardian’s article, had rather ironically highlighted that “... he (Tim Berners-Lee) warns that ‘there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way’”. And who is to blame for that exactly?

However, as TBL concludes in his own post:

And, fortunately, we have blogs. We can publish what we actually think, even when misreported.

Touch! And an appropriate way to sum it up in my opinion.

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