Tim Berners-Lee and the Digital Revolution
Post categories: BBC Online
| 16:19 UK time, Monday, 13 July 2009
[Editor's note: This is the video we promised you of Tim Berners-Lee. It's from Friday's event to launch a new collaborative TV documentary series on the web. We asked Dan Biddle from the Digital Revolution production team for his thoughts on the day.]
'The Web at 20' launch of Digital Revolution was classic swimming duck event management - calm and smooth to all above and frantic paddling underneath and behind the scenes. Dan Gluckman and I spent the morning editing video, uploading blogs and making sure tech and wifi were working on the day.
I spent the whole of Friday 10 July 2009 supressing the urge to punch the air in excitement at the site's launch and the subsequent chance to meet, not only Tim Berners-Lee, but Bill Thompson and Baroness Greenfield - and to see them talking about the very subject I have made my life for the last few years, and for years to come.
Sir Tim was excellent; I doubt there was a person in the room that didn't feel a degree of awe in his presence, and his self effacing answer to the reported question by a customs official who asked why he'd invented the web was lovely: "Well, somebody had to." A very British genius.
Small miracles allowed us to successfully live-link to San Francisco to see and hear Chris Anderson describe his ideas around the 'free-conomy'. Baroness Greenfield was energising and challenging to the web-fans in the room, and Bill Thompson delivered a wonderfully humane brand of geek wisdom.
An outstanding launch to a unique project about an immense subject. I hope that our open source production can carry the momentum of this debate forward, and that the web communities, creators and users will join us to make the best documentary possible worthy of the web.
Find out more at the Digital Revolution (working title) website and blog. It's an open source documentary and wants your participation, ideas and involvement.
Comment number 1.
At 17:20 13th Jul 2009, SheffTim wrote:Any chance of videos/transcripts of Bill Thompson and Baroness Greenfields contributions too.
Also, as the Digital Revolution project gets underway it is important that many perspectives are heard about the Web, including those from people with reservations about it.
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Comment number 2.
At 17:49 13th Jul 2009, Dan Biddle wrote:Hi SheffTim,
We've just blogged a new post https://bbc.kongjiang.org/www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/07/more-from-web-at-20.shtml which includes a couple more moments from Bill Thompson and Baroness Greenfield, but the entire piece has yet to be edited.
As those speeches (and Chris Anderson's) are pertinent to specific parts of our production schedule (much of which is yet to come online for weeks / months) we're going to post those speeches as videos at the best contextual moment.
Regards hearing the many perspectives - that's absolutely what we're after. Interaction, debate, conversation about the web with the web - that's the lifeblood of this project. Criticism from all sides? - yes please, providing there's stories / facts to back up the comments to better our thinking. Tell us we're right, wrong, barking up the wrong tree in the right forest - but do it with a link or story we can follow up and build into our research and inform our argument.
Many thanks for your interest - join in where you feel you can.
Dan
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