I don’t know what Sir Tim Berners-Lee said to everyone else but what he said to me at a talk at the IEE last night was [in no particular order]:

1. That there should be more women in technology; and he mocked the mature nature of engineers, while noting that women can be their own worst enemies.

2. That getting round patent laws and keeping the web royalty free was difficult.

3. That his www proposal went out on a memo round CERN in March 1989, and then again in May 1990, with a subject line which indicated the duplication. And that his boss had scribbled on the proposal ‘exciting but vague’.

4. That wikis are actually in one sense a return to the early days of the day by their ‘read-write’ nature. And that blogs are great but there was a danger they may end up as poor quality information.

5. That Google and the like know a lot about us.

6. That he had started on the web work when CERN bought a couple of ‘NeXT’ machines just for the heck of checking them out.

7. That the term ‘URL’ is fine but ‘URI’ is better.

8. That if he had to do the invention of the www again he’d drop ‘//’ and reverse ‘co.uk’ to ‘uk.co’ as the correct hierarchy.

9. That mobile technology, whatever the benefits of voice recognition, still means you’re talking to a computer (gettit? no, oh well) through a small screen but if you could mount the viewer on a pair of sun glasses might be fun.

10. That you should never trust physicists to write software.

11. There’s a xml parser error on harvard site.

12. And that there is basically too much UGC on the web.