I think IT projects are about supporting social systems – about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.
We shouldn’t build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.
The Semantic Web isn’t inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It’s just about the relationships between things.
I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that’s not going to get to my insurance company and I’m going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they’ve figured I’m looking at those books.
I don’t know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people’s websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
In ’93 to ’94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.
It’s mine – you can’t have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I’m getting in return.
Things can change so fast on the internet.
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don’t know why they haven’t been done yet.
People keep asking me what I think of it now that it’s done. Hence my protest: The Web is not done!
I’m very aware there are lots of other people who are just bright and working just as hard, with just the same dedication to make the world a good place.
Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.
On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable.
The Google algorithm was a significant development. I’ve had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.
The world’s urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.
You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.
There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.
The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I’ll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you’re not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.
I don’t believe in the sort of “Eureka!” moment idea. I think it’s a myth. I’m very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.
We need to look at the whole society and think, “Are we actually thinking about what we’re doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?”
E-mail is interesting. We can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it.