At Long Last, Browser Inventor Has His Own Blog

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the browser, has started his own blog.

Berners-Lee is accostmed to putting his thoughts and words online, via tools such as Amaya and Nvu, which allow direct editing of Web pages. But using blog tools is a new experience.

"I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools," he wrote. "So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog."

Berners-Lee, now a scientist at MIT, found that his blog was inundated with welcoming comments, so many that he had to post a general "thank you" to all the well-wishers. In his typical self-deprecating manner, Berners-Lee thanked others for their early work.

"I just played my part," he wrote. "I built on the work of others--the Internet, invented 20 years before the Web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext…"Berners-Lee noted that his blog at DIG (Decentralized Information Group at MIT's CSAIL) is intended to be for "geeky semantic web stuff mostly."

A native of the U.K., Berners-Lee invented the first Internet browser while working at a European atomic research laboratory in Switzerland 15 years ago. Building upon his work, Marc Andreessen of the University of Illinois created the Mosaic browser, which in turn helped spawn Netscape Navigator.

"Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space," said Berners-Lee, blogging away.