Tim Berners-Lee gets twitchy about the web

So is Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee suffering a little bit from post-traumatic invention disorder?

In an interview with the BBC, the British developer behind the World Wide Web says if the internet and the way it is used is to develop unchecked, then "bad things" could happen.

During the interview, he said: "If we don't have the ability to understand the web as it's now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad. Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation start spreading over the web.

"Studying these forces and the way they're affected by the underlying technology is one of the things that we think is really important."

TB-L is setting up a Web Science research project to study both the technological and social impact of the web on society.

Unfortunately he fails to outline what the "bad things" could be. Perhaps knowing that this beast that he helped create could eventually or indeed has already got out of control would actually have a tendency to play on anyone's mind.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution