Reactions to
Weaving the Web
by Tim Berners-Lee

Chapter 13: Machines and the web &
Chapter 14: Weaving the Web

Lindsay Alaishuski
I was glad to see such an optimistic Berners-Lee in these two chapters in discussing the future of the Web. However, I beg to differ with his positivity. I had a real hard time believing how this creation of a universal language could ever occur. It probably has something to do with my own struggles in learning the French language. Although there are many words, rules, and ideas in both the English and French languages which coincide, English will never be French, French will never be English, and it would be practically impossible to combine them into a language to suit speakers of both.

On a positive note, I am excited for the day when computers can have the logical powers of a human. Sure, any computer can find the square root of 2134545 faster than I can, but I still think my mind contains more logical abilities than today's web search engines. Every time I use these search engines, I feel like I have to 'trick' it into giving me the information I want. Most of the time, simply typing the exact subject you are looking for will give you mounds of irrelevant information. Its always a challenge to try to beat the system to find what I want. Altavista, one of my favorite searching sites, claims to be a 'smart' search engine, but I think technology today has potential to create an even 'smarter' one.

I must return to my pessimistic thoughts on Tim's idea of creating a universal language. How can this ever occur? Our planet has been in existence for thousands of years and there has yet to be a universal language. How can one expect to create a universal language for online communication when this technology has only been around for a mere 20 years? If this language is ever miraculously formed, it definitely won't be seen by us, our children, or even our grandchildren. There are so many obstacles which must be overcome. Some snags in the program will always be present. For example, Tim discusses how RDF and XML will be used to define age as a number and names as a set of characters. However, what would happen if someone typed in that they were "ten" (not 10) years old?? Would this confuse the computer and make it think that the child's name was ten? This was an example of a barrier involving solely the English language. Things are bound to get much more confusing when combining numerous languages into one.

I really don't mean to bash Berners-Lee as much as I have in most of my postings. He is an ingenious man with big plans and powerful ideas. I seem to be of the sort that is very practical and not much of a risk taker. I applaud Tim's efforts and endeavors on making the Web what it is today. If the world was full of unrisky people like myself, those encyclopedias in the library wouldn't be covered with cobwebs, and we would only be using our computers to type reports and play solitaire. Hooray for Tim and the rest of the Nerds of the world!!!

Diana Applegate
In the last two chapters, I enjoyed learning more about what Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do a search on "women and the internet", for example, and not end up with a list full of links to pornographic sites? We need a "smart" search engine!

At this point in time, in order to find sources of valuable information on the web, one really has to do some time-consuming digging. When Berners-Lee mentioned the "logic engine", I thought of Ask.com, which allows you to type a direct question into the search field. I found that Ask.com yields much more accurate results than a regular search engine like Yahoo or Webcrawler. I'm taking a trip to Paris in a few weeks and was clueless about how to get a passport, so I posed this question to Ask, which instantly directed me to the U.S. Government's very extensive and detailed site on how to get a passport! I was impressed, and amazed! However, it's worth nothing that "passport" is a very specific term, and had I instead entered something like, "Where can I find websites specifically for women?", I probably wouldn't have gotten wonderful results.

There is no question that machines can "learn" to connect pieces of information, and even draw logical conclusions. This has been shown through work on knowledge representation in AI. But as Berners-Lee points out, humans overwhelmingly learn through experiences. Over time we build up a larger and larger "knowledge base" that we can refer back to. The information in our knowledge base also helps us when confronted with novel ideas or unfamiliar situations. It's isn't enough to have all the facts in the world stored in memory. As humans, we know how to interpret and analyze them.

It could be argued that machines might, in fact, gain "life experience" and therefore "learn" by being unleashed in specific simulated environments. As I discovered in CS372, one can very simply create a robot, given some legos and a minimal program in C, that can find its way out of a maze after a few trials. Certain machine behaviors often "evolve" or "emerge" once the 'bots become familiar with their environment. However, the knowledge bases that machines can build up are still quite limited in that they are usually situation-specific, as opposed to human though processes which can be applied in an infinite number of very different circumstances.

It seems as if machines do, in fact, have the ability to perform complex calculations similar to the human's use of logic and inference. But the age old question "Can machines think?" that became popular with Alan Turing and the introduction of the Turing test is one without a clear-cut answer. The machine's lack of life experience and common sense as opposed to that which a human being only develops through years and years of true (as opposed to simulated) interaction with our planet, is something that can be compensated for only by approximation. Machines may become "smarter" in the coming years, but their inner workings won't be directly comparable to the complexity of the human brain. This is not to say that machine learning will be a failure, however.

Hilary Chamberlain
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was if we thought he was an idealist before, what is he now? Boy, I think he certainly packed as much feel good warm fuzzies about his religious beliefs and how they tied into his vision of the web, and how the web is going to go so far. I think I am sort of skeptical about these last chapters, epsecially after the talk we heard today. The visiting prof definately brought up a lot of good points that really made me think, and I have thought a lot this afternoon about where exactly the web is headed. And I think that in these chapters, Berners-Lee has made it apparent that he thinks the web is going to take over the world, going so far as to spend an entire chapter talking just about the language the consortium is developing to make computers basically think for us. Yeah, there's a lot of junk out there on the web, which makes it very difficult to search quickly and effectively for many things. But at the same time, do we really want a computer processing all the information it gets and spitting out only what someone has programmed it to "think" that it likes? I don't really see the point in this new Semantic web language, if it has to be powerful, but can't be powerful, and has to be able to do these certain things, but can't do others, I'm afraid I don't understand how they are going to control the power of a particular language without taking away that power.

I don't know, after reading these chapters and hearing the talk today, I am just feeling totally confused. Is there really a point to all this? Is it really a good thing to have the internet and the WWW basically take over our society? The one thing that's really on my mind right now is the ever widening gap between upper and lower classes and the shrinking of the middle class. Just like we talked about today, the more powerful computers become, the more power that certain people get, and those certain people sound like a bunch of old white men again.I really don't think that's what we need.

Maybe I am just totally off on a tangent here and I am really not well versed enough to really understand the social and economic impacts of the web. Maybe I am just shooting off at the mouth, which I usually do. And maybe I just don't understand what Berners-Lee is getting at because I really don't understand all these computer languages and how they work.

At the end of Chapter 13, he says "As I write about the new technology, I do wonder whether it will be a technical dream or a legal nightmare."

And what immediately came to my mind was that a legal nightmare might not be the only nightmare that could come out of having computers that can in effect think and respond. The power that gives to the priveledged few will really divide classes and races and sexes. Berners-Lee says it well on page 200: "At the other extreme is the utopian commune with no structure, which doesn't work because nobody takes out the garbage." Wouldn't that be the web? Without anyone to take out the garbage, how does the web maintain, and how will it maintain in the future?

I don't know, I don't think I am expressing how I feel very well, but I am not real clear on how this all fits together. I really like having the internet and the web and the technology. I am not sure just how much it has impacted my life, because it's hard to tell when I'm in the middle of it. I do know that the web has enabled me to do a lot of things that would be very hard to do otherwise. I am gonna shut up now, because this really doesn't make a lot of sense.

Sarah Crown
The first issue which struck me was when Tim Berners-Lee started discussing how people Ego surf in search of occurrences of their own name on the Internet. He states that many people search for their name because we have a certain responsibility to figure out where we fit in the world. After reading the statement, I was intrigued because not only had I assumed that one could not find information about me on the Internet, but that whatever information there was, it would not present a clear picture of where I felt I fit into the world. As it turns out, I decided to search for occurrences of my name on the Internet and was surprised to find several sites containing my name. Both sites were reporting results from road races in which I had run. In terms of my ideas of where I feel I fit in the world, I dont feel that these race reports present a clear picture. While I do love running, this is not how I feel I fit into the world, nor do I feel that the web helped me to discover where my place is. I realize that for someone whose name occurs in a variety of contexts on the World Wide Web, he/she would have a better opportunity of seeing his/her place in the world, but this person would probably already realize the impact of his/her presence in society.

Another issue which struck me was when Berners-Lee was discussing how we should design a intelligent browser. As he states, The next step is a search engine that can apply logic to deduce whether each of the many responses it gets to an initial search is useful. While I can definitely understand his frustration with the current web browsers in that they merely look for the occurrences of certain words, I dont think we should try to make a web browser which has the power to logically think. Even though such a browser would make surfing the web easier, the future implications of such a browser could be dangerous. I think any piece of technology which has the power to think like a human being is a threat to society. While such a browser would not logically deduce at the same level as a human being, it is a step closer to creating a piece of technology which could potentially be harmful.

The final point which I disagreed with was Tim Berners-Lees desire for the web to allow for common understanding between all human beings. I agree that sometimes common understanding can be useful, but I dont think we should have a goal to reach common understanding. If each person spoke the same language, used the same currency, had the same beliefs, or the same definitions of happiness, sadness, love, etc. , there would be a small area for creativity. I think it is such discussions where people dont have a common understanding that make life interesting. Such discussions are important in that they allow people to see a different viewpoint, but people are not forced to come to a common agreement on a specific issue.

Huong Dang
"The disadvantage of using reasoning engines is that, because they can combine data from all over the Web in their search for an answer, it can be too easy to ask as open question that will result in an endless quest."(192)

"...By just pushing the amount we have to read and write, the number of -emails we have to cope with, the number of Web sites we have to surf, we may scrape together a few more bytes of knowledge, but exhaust ourselves in the process and miss the point." (202)

I agree. It feels like eons ago when I went to a library wanting to research the latest techniques of basket weaving and immediately heading towards to the book catalogues. The process was simple though there was no guarantee you would find the latest basket weaving publication after walking blocks to the local library, which was a bummer.

But now, searching for a book or any published anything is a click away. Thereís no walking required, no need to even get dressed - just slither over to our PC or MAC and type basket weaving. The Web HAS opened the doors to convenience. Unfortunately though, it has also opened the window to junk ñ junk images, junk mail, junk messages, and junky people. Before there was distance from your sources, and your were able to select what items to SEARCH for since the search was tiresome. Now, a mouse click away and we have endless scrolls of resources. Now our time is swallowed up with us reading our sources and seeing what is relevant and credible.

"This atmosphere is new. Software patents are new. The Internet ethos in the seventies and eighties was one of sharing for the common good...Large companies stockpile patents as a threat of retaliation against suits from their peers. Small companies may be terrified to enter the business." (197)

"The original aim of patents - to promote the publication and deployment of ideas and to protect the incentive for research is noble, but abuse is now a very serious problem." (197)

There will always be abuses of every kind in every good thing ñ be it the law, in business, or relationships. However, due to these abuses, many small businesses, as Tim mentioned earlier, are threatened. Moreover, thereís the technology question surfacing on whether anyone can enter the corporate world being unfamiliar with the Web? Will the fate of your business depend on how techno-savvy you are?

Furthermore, as I cynically mentioned before, our human drive proceeds us. We have a Darwinistic drive to survive and compete, creating consequences (i.e. Microsoft vs. Netscape). But look what is has accomplished ñ placing America as one of the leading countries in the world trade and human rights.

Unfortunately, it has also driven men to scrabble to cheat the next trusting individual out of his/her ideas, monetary value, and space. Yes, the Web "lets us do things more quickly." (199) And yes, it has helped me talk to people once unreachable due to geography boundaries whenever I please. (200) However, the Web also gives criminals accessible information about you, no boundaries or limitations once removed by your geography. Not suggesting that criminals werenít able to access information about you before the Web, but emphasizing that it is more accessible and closer than you think. Scary thought, huh?

On a more positive note: "Whether a group can advance comes down to creating the right connectivity between people..."(200)

"The new Web will make it much more likely that somebody somewhere is browsing one source that has half of the key idea, and happens to have just recently browsed another." (201)

"...any two people could get together and exchange views, and even end up working together somehow." (209)

Researching with the worldís brilliant minds is one of ñ if not-the heaviest advantages of the Web. "Should we then feel that we are getting smarter and smarter, more and more in control of nature, as we evolve? Not really. Just better connected - connected into a better shape."(209)

Maybe we are in better shape. I would not be able to type this journal entry at 4:55 PM and still get credit for it by just clicking on the send button before 5:00 PM. Technology is wonderful, and we're all procrastinators!

Beth Fedornak
Nerds. The history that was relayed in this video was very informative. Coming for the business world I was interested to hear the dollar figures that was involved with the Internet. Like the 2 billion online Internet advertising revenue, AOL's net worth of 16 billion and the 75 million Netscape/Mosaic made its first year was mind boggling. I'm sure when Tim had the concept of inventing the web he never realized the potential of his invention. With the introduction of the browser and Microsoft's jump into the industry it has really opened a lot of doors to the common people that might have remained closed for years. But what we must remember is that no one owns the Internet and due to this fact we will always have people that wish to censor or control what is put on the web. The fact the sex sells is hard for people to accept yet we must look at the Internet in the big picture.. it has opened doors to information for many people. Obtaining research has now become easier to access. With a few clicks of the mouse know have a world of information at my fingertips. I'm willing to put up with the free speech of others as a trade off for all of the good things the Internet has to offer.

Chapter 13 and 14 - Now that the Internet has been invented and is moving along at a fast pace how can we enhance this system. Tim's idea is to have easier access to information and to be able to find a way to find a common language so that this can be accomplished.

I'm glad to see that the consortium is developing a program to help solve this problem. The problem with be with the implementing this plan for deploying it. It seems Tim's and others have the concern of should we give people the access to this powerful descriptive language on the web? But the goal of the computer language coming together will eventually over rule the fears of others and eventually there will be a universal language used by all.

According to Tim the web has to be able to change slowly, one step at a time, without being stopped and redesigned from the ground up. But what Tim has to remember is that he is trying to stop a herd of running horses. Yes, some control will be gained but we will always have a maverick that will break free and run in it's own direction.

With any luck Tim's closing comments will come true... Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we all work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey.

According to Tim, should we feel that we are getting smarter and smarter, more and more in control or nature, as we evolve? Not really. Just better connected-connected into a better shape.

YunJin Jun
While reading the last two chapters, I was amazed to see how the web kept evolving and getting better every day and how people were trying to make better use of the web. I was sort of losing track when Berners-Lee first mentioned Semantic Web, but finishing that chapter, I could see how we would be able to have the information that we need easily through Semantic Web and we would be better connected with others with the new technology in the future. I think that the web does have potential to evolve greatly in the future, but I am a little skeptical about whether it will really understand what human beings think and want. I do agree that the web has improved our lives greatly, but I dont necessarily think that it brought us greater freedom and social growth because it has caused a lot of troubles and frictions among groups of people.

Overall, the book was a bit difficult to understand, but it really helped me to see the web in a different way that I had never realized before and gave me better understanding on how the web came to exist. Finishing the book, I am concerned about the impact of the web and its dominance in out lives. I am sort of afraid that maybe someday computers will take control of our lives, but on the bright side, they helped us to live better lives and to communicate more easily with others, and I hope that the web will be developed in more of good ways in the future.

Ning Lin
The author talks about the difficuties to make the computer understand what the people would like to find on the web. I started to search articles for my papers 2 years ago. When I firstly got to know about the search engine, I thought it could be very helpful since it can get any information on the web. However, facing thousands of results returned by the search engine, I realized that it was actually very difficult to find the thing that I exactly need. Because the computer can not understand my question, and it was not answering my question either. It just simply find all the information which includes the words in my question. Therefore, searching online is not that efficient as it is expected to be. I remember that there is a smarter engine on www.hotbot.com. It is better than other search engine, because it actually understand your simple questions ( not all the time though) in some extent. It is very interesting to read the part which talks about how to teach the computer to understand something. Programs can be written to teach computer to do provide different services according to different request.

In the last chapter, I like the idea that web actually can connect every one together while it keeps the diversity. Web helps people in different nations, different areas to communicate and exchange their different ideas and knowledge. However, author mentions the costs brought by the web as well. When we are enjoying the advanced technologies today, we are worrying about the things that we did not need to worry about in the past. Although web still has a lot of shortcoming and a lot of improvements are needed. I think the gains we get from the web is absolutely bigger than the costs. Anyway, if we are always afraid of costs, there will be no gain.

Megan Rutter
This chapter made me ask a very important question. As Time Berners-Lee says, the Web is ever-changing and evolving, but my question remains, will a new Web ever be "released?" Will individuals and companies continue working on improving the Web until it is time to release an updated version? In the Nerds 2.0.1 someone pointed out that the Web was very very poorly designed (but he wasn't at all bitter that his version didn't work. No, not at all...) He said that, while the idea was great, and it obviously proved to be, the actual design was not very sophisticated. I recall Berners-Lee making a similar comment. He said that his first version of the Web had back links, and that there still exist things which could be improved upon.

I know that software and hardware are constantly changing and being released. But is is possible to just release a new Web? And if so, will it be done? People couldn't imagine the Web before it came, so now I'm wondering what will be created next. What will be released within the next five years? Within the next ten years? Considering how much the Web has changed our lives, there's no way we can predict what our lives may be like in twenty years if something else like the Web is created. Berners-Lee discusses many details about the Web and many types of software that are used on the Web, but I really want to know whether people are researching and trying to create new things that are not encompassed by the Web, but things that are bigger than the Web and will change our lives completely and forever. It really makes you think.

Grace Shin
"Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we all work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey."

As I finished the book, I realized that the web has come a great ways in a short period of time. With this thought, I also realize that the web has so much potential to be better. Semantic Web has allowed us to really have a greater knowledge of this society. The fact that the web has a characteristic of always changing and evolving, gives more hope for what the web will be able to accomplish in the future. The fact that from simple search engines, we now have logic "guessing" engines and systems which can be programed to understand our stream of words like "if", "but", and "why" really has the potential to help us greatly. We can really see the uses of web being quite versatile. Even in lower levels like elementary schools, search engines like askjeeves.com are used to allow the children to ask questions which they are curious of.

The idea of the society working together to form the web which will benefit all is a bit on the questionable side. However, I don't think that we got this far because everyone worked together. It seems to me that the existence of the web depends of the randomness and the chaotic characteristic of the web itself. The quote stated above is right in that everyone does their own individual thing. However, I can't say that everyone will be doing it for the all-around goodness of the society. But, when people do try to achieve their individual goals and somehow "weave" it into the web, then the information is out for the world and people are interconnected.

In conclusion, I thought that this book was really helpful in understanding of what impacts us so greatly now: the web. The question of the future of the web may be a bit mysterious, but nevertheless, I think that the web is inevitably improving and becoming more and more useful.

Annie Zipper
I thought Tim Berners-Lee summed up his points from the previous 12 chapters very nicely in these last 2 chapters of the book. He is obviously very hopeful about the internet and its implications for humankind. He is not afraid to point out what he sees as wrong with the Web and what needs to happen to fix the "chaos." He criticizes many aspects of his own creation, which is commendable. He clearly sees potential to do far more than what we are doing with the Web now. When I began reading this book, I thought the Web was a masterpiece of technology and its creators must be sitting back and enjoying their work. Now I realize this is not the case and the Web is very much still a work-in-progress. This had never occurred to me before and makes me view the Web in a very different light. Perhaps it will be interesting to come back to this book in 10 years and see just how many of Berners-Lee's "new" Web ideas have been realized.

Nerds 2.0.1 was a good documentary for what it was. I enjoyed watching it. Its creators clearly tried to lend some "spice" to what could be a very dry retelling of the creation of the internet. Some of the material they threw in seemed extremely unnecessary (the 2 scenes with the online stripper seemed rather superfluous) but I appreciate that they were trying to keep viewers' interests. I was disappointed that the movie was so male-oriented. There were perhaps 4 women in the entire 3-hour film and one of those was a stripper. I was not impressed by that aspect of the film, but overall it was worth seeing and did give me a better understanding of the risk and luck involved in the creation of the internet, even if it did make it look like every young 20-something who wrote software in the early 90's got rich quick.

Alicia Zukas
Berners-Lee's final chapter give his outlooks of the web's future. Instead of reading as a text book, it personalizes the web to the author. He makes references back to the first set of chapters, which relate the web to a brain, capable of making connections and links. The author takes one step further to give this mechanical brain logical capabilities. I do not know whether to say this appears to be unreasonable or if such comprehensive programs may be written. We have all encountered search engines, I am certain, and they do result in complex searches and irrelevant web site finds. I believe it soon will be feasible and accurate to generate a search to find the answer to a question as "where was a baseball game played where it was 22 degrees." With this semi-logical approach, heuristic programs have been developed to discover unordinary credit card purchases/ locations. When someone does develop this logic search engine, I can't imagine the amount of money they will make.

This brings me to the idea of patents. I do find it interesting that in the US, someone can paten the way in which something is done, probably not unrelated to the fact that the US is sue-happy. As said in the last discussion, perhaps the author is taking too much responsibility over the web. He gives these great outlooks for it, but seems to feel personal obligation to its success. As we had said before, he develops a 3-D medium for communication and then makes his dollar through writing this 2-D book.

We can relate the web to fractals, neurons, electrons, but the last thing I would do would be to, on the last page, relate it to my religion. I did enjoy this book; I think I'll even read it again after watching Nerds 2.0.1. I do hope that after all the hard work Berners-Lee has done, and appears to continue to do, he gets his money out of it.

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