Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

Let’s pause for a moment on August 6^th, and wish a happy birthday – to the World Wide Web.

The web is 17 years old this year. This amazing invention has changed our lives. It’s changed the way we communicate. And it will continue to do so for many more years to come.

We can thank a British scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for not only inventing the ubiquitous code www, but for releasing it to the world for free, forever. He modestly said his project “aims to allow links to be made to any destination anywhere.” So today, we can access just about anything or anyone, anywhere, anytime in the world. This is powerful tool!

We have developed new ways of interacting with each other – through social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace. But the most important change I believe is that we can communicate with each other directly. We don’t need a go-between. We don’t need someone to represent our views. We can post them on the web just like I’m doing on this blog. We can find people who think like us, act like us, believe in the same things we do or challenge us. And we can communicate with them.

I can talk to someone in Australia - by email, instant messaging or voice - as easily as I can talk to my next door neighbour in Canada. We are sharing in a way that has never happened before. This is an era where the single voice counts and is being heard. We’re giving each other advice, support and information for free. We’re buying and selling from each other. And in the process, we are changing our world together.

I recently bought a copy of Wickinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. It’s all about this new world of collaboration and its power to redefine business and our daily lives. In the preface the authors talk about the impact of this collaboration on climate change.

“So for the first time, we have one global, multimedia, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world, there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring in which everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions. The ‘killer application’ for mass collaboration may turn out to be saving the planet, literally.”

Who knows we may literally save our planet. But there’s a dark side too being able to communicate freely. You can meet a lot of bad people on the web and they can do you serious harm. But we’re beyond going back. So we have to move forward with eyes wide open and brains fully engaged to stop and think before we act.

So much has happened in the last 17 years. I can’t wait for the next 17.

Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

Obama’s Nuts

Recently Jesse Jackson got caught whispering into a live microphone in a television studio “I wanna cut his nuts.” He was voicing his disagreement with the way Barack Obama was handling his election campaign. Jackson isn’t the only one to be caught on a live mic. It happens all the time.

Just before his wedding to Camilla, Prince Charles was caught whispering rude comments about a journalist during a press scrum with his sons. The journalist had just asked him a question. Prince Charles muttered “Bloody people. I can’t bear that man anyway. He’s so awful. He really is.”

President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were caught having a private conversation at lunch. There was some bantering then Bush criticized Hezbollah’s attack on Syria with his mouth full of food. “See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s--- and it's over.”

And there was the time when former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s director of communications, Francine Ducros got caught calling President Bush ‘a moron’. She didn’t last long in her job.

There are too many gaffes like these to list them all here. What’s interesting is that the comments are all made by people who should know better. These are all public figures. I’m betting they’ve all been media trained to death and advised to death. And here they are falling into the simplest trap of all. Saying what they shouldn’t be saying when there’s a microphone close by.

So the rule is when there is a mic near you - edit yourself. Around journalists, or in broadcast studios, never say anything in private that you wouldn’t want made public.