By silicon.com, 19 September 2008 16:34
Tim Berners-Lee is a worried man. How so? After all he was bestowed with a knighthood by Her Majesty for bestowing the World Wide Web on humanity.
It's the second bit of bestowing that's got him bothered, for his creation is out of control and has taken on an unholy life of its own.
A bit like Prometheus, figuratively speaking, Tim developed the building blocks and the tenets behind the web and brought illumination and power to humankind where previously there was none.
Tim is worried the web is no longer being taken seriously and that some of the information on it lacks accuracy. Look, the Round-Up realises this might come as a shock but there's no point beating around the bush: not everything on the internet is true.
Yes, it came as a surprise here, too.
Sir Tim was particularly concerned about the rumours circulating about the possible effect of turning on the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland.
The Round-Up knows it's a terrifying prospect, scientists playing God, Prometheus unbound. Many sleepless nights have been endured since the power-crazy boffins flicked the switch threatening to turn the Earth into a Black Hole.
"Ah, yes but look," said Berners-Lee, "this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about."
Except he didn't, the Round-Up was paraphrasing there to get the message across and inadvertently added another morsel of misinformation to the already dense fabric of untruth that constitutes the web. Sorry, Tim.
Speaking to the BBC this week, Berners-Lee expressed his concern at the manner in which the web was increasingly being used to spread disinformation, moving ever further away from his grand vision for his creation.
Berners-Lee was speaking at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation he co-created to make the web truly world wide. He suggested there must be ways of identifying content on websites that give some kind of assurance about its veracity.
Surely he isn't suggesting some new kind of tagging - semantically correct, of course - for the next HTML standard. Something like
Almost. He's advocating some sort of kite mark scheme for websites that publishers will readily add to their pages to ensure readers are aware of the veracity of what's been written. A kind of label for trustworthiness.
Hm, good luck with that one. The web doesn't discriminate it disseminates. Tim would be better off revelling in his creation and letting the world's wired audience judge what is and isn't quality. We are living in a 2.0 world these days, the power is with the people not the publishers. Or at least that's what the Round-Up read online so who knows whether it's true or not.
No, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat's out of the bag, the badger's out of the teapot - however you like to say it round your way - and it's not going to go back in no matter how hard you try.
Senator John McCain is many things: respected politician, highly decorated war veteran and inventor of the BlackBerry.
The latter bit of surprising information surfaced earlier this week during a briefing by one of the Presidential hopeful's advisors.
Two things happened in quick succession.
First, the news quickly filtered through the web onto scores of websites.
Second, Tim Berners-Lee threw up his arms in despair.
The revelation came when McCain's economic advisor was asked to explain just what the Senator had achieved during his stint as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Holding up his BlackBerry, Douglas Holtz-Eakin said: "He did this."
Holtz-Eakin added: "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
The Round-Up wishes Douglas had pulled out an iPhone, just to see the reaction from Apple.
So just how did a US Senator come up with the technical specifications for one of the most popular personal technology devices of the last decade?
The Obama camp reportedly responded with the following statement: "If John McCain hadn't said that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' on the day of one of our nation's worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week".
Still can't we give McCain the humble BlackBerry? After all, it's not as if he claimed he invented the internetĀ
In related news, what do BlackBerrys, sawn-off shotguns and a dozen dead pheasants all have in common?
Look, you're not going to get it so the Round-Up will tell you: they're all items that have been left in London taxi cabs over the last six months.
Before we move on, how do you take 12 dead pheasants into a taxi and forget to take them out? Where do you get 12 dead pheasants in London?
It's the number of BlackBerrys and other mobile phones left in cabs that provides the tech angle for this story. The number is 55,843 - in six months. Sorry, two numbers.
Let's break down the numbers a little more. So 55,843 mobile phones left in taxis over the last six months. Plus 6,193 other handheld devices such as laptops, iPods and memory sticks.
Now, according to the Public Carriage Office, there are currently 21,729 black cabs in London and not a single one south of the River past 10 o'clock on a Saturday night. So that's 10,000 mobile phones left in black cabs every month - almost three per taxi. This is excluding the mini-cab firms. Does anyone in London still actually have a mobile?
What else has been left in your average Hackney Carriage? Obviously the 12 dead pheasants and the aforementioned shotgun. There were also: false teeth, a wide and interesting variety of pets, some toilet seats, funeral ashes and Ā£2,700 in cash (and the rest). Oh, and a couple of children.
Happily, around 80 per cent of London cabbies surveyed claimed these lost gadgets and their owners were eventually reunited. The Round-Up doesn't know what happened to the kids.
Thank your lucky stars you live in London. If you lived in New York, the chances of getting lost gadgetry back aren't so great: only 66 per cent of the taxi drivers said they hand gadgets back into the depots at the end of the day. Have a nice day.
In the meantime, here's a hint to all those planning a cab ride this weekend: don't put your wafer-thin mobile phone in your trouser pocket, put it in your jacket.
Better still, buy one of those little leather belt clips. Yes, it will make you look like a geography teacher but at least you can call the cab rank at two in the morning and ask them if they've found your iPod nano...
In other news this week.
Worried about the credit crunch? No? Then here are 10 ways in which the economic downturn will hit the IT sector.
Can't remember dozens of passwords? Then let your fingers do the talking. Our inability to remember all those combinations of numbers, letters and strange keyboard symbols is resulting in booming sales for biometrics products. Plus you get to pretend you're a spy.
Take a ride through history and into the future with these pictures from TDK. From reel-to-reel to Blu-Ray and beyond. Whoever said storage wasn't sexy? And check out that wallpaper.
Until next week, don't forget to pit your wits against fellow readers in the caption competition.
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