Week in Review: How a Brit set the web free

You wouldn’t be reading this without it. No YouTube, blogs, email, social networking… Tim Berners-Lee’s and Cern’s decision to set the World Wide Web free was crucial in making it what it is today.

And while some of the original pictures released show that while Berners-Lee doesn’t seem to have changed very much, the technology used at the time definitely has.

He admits that a similar hyperlink system could have been created by others, but the decision to not charge royalties was an incredibly generous gesture that allowed the world to get involved and turn it into something which many people’s lives now revolve around.

Important web 2.0 technology such as peer-to-peer networks, blogs and social networks are all based on this free and available to all principle, and who knows what we’ll see in the next five to 10 years?

In these days where selfish greed has almost sent the world to its knees, the fact that we can share and communicate with the world so freely and so easy could be a light at the end of the tunnel.

So a British scientist was responsible for the web as we know it. Could a Brit be the one who is responsible for a new way to search?

If it works, the IT PRO office agrees that Wolfram Alpha could be a technology that could make a huge impact on IT.

By May, London-born scientist Stephen Wolfram may have an engine that can use the web to answer questions, rather than simply looking for documents.

On first thought, you could be thinking an intelligent computer on the scale of the Terminator-style Skynet system that could take over the world, but Wolfram says it is purely a factual question system – a tool rather than a mind.

As already mentioned, we’ve already seen rise of collaborative technology in a very short space of time – it isn’t a particular stretch to imagine a new type of search in the near future, whether by Wolfram or some other IT genius.

It’s a very exciting time to be involved in technology. We may not see flying cars or jetpacks any time soon, but a whole digital world is out there ready to be explored.

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