Tim Berners Lee |
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3 November 2025 - Erlenbach
I like think that my website, 27 years old, can mostly be run in Netscape Navigator. And whatever will exist in another 27 or 270 years or 2700. Hopefully we won't need a Rosetta Stone for HTML. I still write in plain HTML because I believe in Tim Berners-Lee's vision. Initially I approached his invention in the late 90's as a genealogist - to share history. I really wish my grandfather Neal had lived to see what Berners-Lee wrought. He was an engineer. If you search "Wogsland" in a patent database, his name will be at the top of the results and be most of them. If the US Army hadn't started classifying his work I'm sure there would be more. And in his filing cabinets of genealogical research I learned history and the value of collaboration. When I created Wogsland.org in 2002 or 2003 I wanted to make it a wiki, but unfortunately I didn't know how or who to ask to teach me. But then I wrote alot on Wikipedia before, ironically, I was kicked off because my handle, my last name, wogsland, was considered racist. After having had so many arguments about whether my ancestor Hallvard Graatop was real I gave up and stopped contributing to Wikipedia and just concentrated on my own site.
Then came MySpace and Facebook and I wondered why anyone would give control to these companies rather than just make their own website. I don't want to say that most people were too stupid to figure it out, but I'm still wondering. It's a common fallicy intelligent people delude themselves with. I didn't know how to set up a wiki so I edited Wikipedia. And many other people had a MySpace then Facebook page rather than learning how to make their own website. Still I joined them. Twitter and Instagram and YouTube were other, more social beasts where the community purpose was obvious from the beginning. And then came LinkedIn, most useful until Github showed up. Get a better job on one and share code on the second!
In 2007 I tried to build a company, TheWineRater, around sharing wine ratings like those I read about in The Wine Spectator. I envied Gary Vaynerchuk, who I honestly thought was my competion despite his having a business selling the bottles he recommended, but I only ever convinced my dad to use my rating system. At dad's funeral I was honored to learn that he'd pitched the system to many of his friends who'd just thought it was quaint and perhaps unnecessary. And thought that it was his. "Do you remember Your dad's system for rating wines? His little notecards?" I copied the notecards from his dad for notes before publishing them. There's really no greater compliment than hearing that my dad absorbed what I did so completely as obvious that he sold it such. Obvious. So far as I know no one else uses my system and certainly no one cares about what's left of the website.
Tim Berners-Lee's technology was well repurposed, but I still like my own website and hopefully history will agree.
