Jan 20, 200602:11 PMThe Life

Tim Berners-Lee started blogging. Finally.

Yes, the Web's creator now has a blog... and 455 comments in response to his first posting!

If you keep adding salt to a glass of water, the saline mixture is eventually unable to hold any more crystals. But when you heat up that solution, more salt can dissolve into the liquid. After removing the heat and dropping in one last grain of salt, the supersaturated concoction quickly deposits its burden onto the newly-added seed crystal, which magically grows before your very eyes.

In the blogosphere, concepts frequently germinate in a similar way, expanding by accretion around certain kernels. Irresistible memes beget more and more bright ideas, often forming powerful chain reactions. A free think tank which serves the entire planet has finally opened for business, and its seed crystal can be traced back to one man.

In his book, TBL writes: "Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process." In other words, he replicated the human brain's capacity for recursive thinking in a software design.

Our millennium's version of the Wild West myth is unfolding in front of us, and we're riding fences along the electronic frontier thanks to a visionary who will be ranked by future generations right next to Gutenberg. Without TBL, we'd all be stranded up the bitstream without a paddle.