Sir Tim

[Tom]

The founder of the WWW has been knighted. Arise Sir Tim (http://www.w3.org/2003/12/timbl_knighted) Every profession needs heros and few have someone half as good. He could have been much richer than Bill if he had patented the idea, they say. Instead he put it into the public domain. See his article on the Semantic Web in Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&pageNumber=1&catID=2). Also note that magazine's adoption of a fundamental web principle: give something away and charge for something else.

[francis]

I was going to mention this the other day, but got caught up in something else. It's about time (although he was apparently previously awarded an OBE (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3357073.stm), especially if people like Beckham are worthy of any kind of official honour. There were something like 981 people given honours just in the new year's honours list. One wonders how much cronyism (http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/Y/htmlY/yesminister/yesminister.htm) goes on with this type of thing.

But without him giving away the technology for free (http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#true), the Web wouldn't be what it is today. So, hooray for him.