December 8th, 2004
Inventor of Web lamented election results
A recent blog entry by David Winer that says "It makes me even sicker than I am to think about the lying President we re-elected" reminded me of the disappointment in the election results that Web inventor and World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee expressed on multiple occasions during the W3C’s day long Tenth Anniversary celebration last week. The feeling I got from his on-stage expresssion of disillusionment as well as from his dialogue with Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe during one of the breaks was palpable. It was as though Berners-Lee’s invention — the Web — had, during its potentially crowning moment, failed in its penultimate task of disseminating the truth and rightfully booting a president.
Consoling Berners-Lee, Metcalfe reminded him that even though the Web didn’t bring home the biggest prize of all, its effects were most definitely felt on two fronts — voter turnout and fundraising. That conversation then spilled over into another that tackled the issue of trust and how facts can be separated from fiction on the Web.
There are numerous methods for encoding consensus-derived trust into documents. eBay facilitates the rating of sellers by buyers and buyers by sellers in its online auctions. The spam problem has resulted in numerous discussions of reputation management protocols and services that would help e-mail recipients assess the reputations of unknown senders. While the W3C conversations were swimming around in my mind, I accidentally bumped into a page in the WikiPedia that attempts to define the year 2004. The Wikipedia — an encyclopedia based on public contributions — allows anyone to visit the site and change the contents of its pages. At the top of the page is the icon of an open hand (in other words "halt"), accompanied by the warning: "The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see its talk page." It seems to me that somewhere among these trust-assessing alternatives are the seeds of a more widely deployed protocol for consensus-based trust.
