Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

Tim Berners-Lee, in a fascinating interview (transcript here) conducted on 28 July, 2006 and published as an IBM podcast.

He goes on to talk about his original concept of the Web:

And the original World Wide Web browser of course was also an editor. I never imagined that anybody would want to write in anchor brackets. We’d had WYSIWYG editors for a long time. So my function was that everybody would be able to edit in this space, or different people would have access rights to different spaces. But I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool.

And for some reason it didn’t really take off that way. And we could discuss for ages why it didn’t. You know, there were browser editors, maybe the HTML got too complicated for a browser just to be easy.

But I’ve always felt frustrated that most people don’t…didn’t have write access. And wikis and blogs are two areas where suddenly two sort of genres of online information suddenly allow people to edit, and they’re very widely picked up, and people are very excited about them.

And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that people need to be creative. They want to be able to record what they think. They want to be able to, if they see something wrong go and fix it…