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The World Wide Web

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Europe's High Energy Research centre (known as CERN) in Switzerland was where the Internet was turned in to the World Wide Web by Tim Burners-Lee when he created HTML, a subset of SGML.

What's the difference between the Internet and the Web?

“A lot of people wonder about the difference between the net and the web. The net is a connection of computers by cables, so as you wonder around the net you find computers, and you find cables and you find routers. But that isn't really what you want to spend your time doing.

The web is an abstract space of information and when you follow links from one document to another your not thinking about computers. And in fact the documents may be on one computer or on different computers, you really don't want to know.

You certainly don't want to know all the things which pre-web you had to know to extract some data from a remote computer. So the hope was that not only a single person's brain but a whole group knowledge could have that property, so that somebody would be able to say this page is related to that page just by putting in that link.” - Tim Burners-Lee¹

The structure behind the web disappeared as browsers were created (the first browser was called Mosaic). Browsers allowed people to explore the web and create links to other documents. Slowly people began to explore what was out there and what was out there had been changing.

The information was always out there but you had to know where to look, but The WWW and graphical browsers were the first stage in making the net into something better. Graphics have allowed the true power of the web to take off and as computers get faster and and connection speed increase the web is slowly moving from a 2D environment to a 3D one that users can move around in, a place rather then a series of pictures.

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Business potential

For business, the potential of the web is it's interactive nature, you can be targeted by ads in away never before thought possible.

“... everyone was launching web sites on the Internet and we knew that the eyeballs, the value of those eyeballs on the net would be very attractive to advertisers.” - Kevin o'Connor, CEO Doubleclick¹

Eyeballs is a marketing and e-commerce term for people.

We also knew that this was a unique opportunity, this is the first time in media where there was a bi-directional cable connecting users to the publishers and that we could do some pretty amazing things with that cable.” - Kevin o'Connor, CEO Doubleclick¹

What this means is that when your looking at adverts they are watching you do it. Companies like Doubleclick are collecting vast quantities of data about people and just what they do with data is becoming a major privacy concern.

“We do a tremendous number of ad placements, almost half a billion a month which comes out to about 400 ads a second which throws out a tremendous amount of data. We take that data and look for new ways of mining that data to bring you the most relevant ad possible and to bring the advertiser the most effective ad possible.” - Kevin o'Connor, CEO Doubleclick¹

This may not sound great, but commercialisation is here to stay, and as the web becomes more commercial businesses will start demanding more and more regulations and controls to protect themselves and their interests. Just as in the real world crime follows commerce, you may not like either one but you can't ignore them.

Some people hate the fact that advertising is now a part of the net and that businesses use the net. They want the net to be a corporate free zone. They believe that by ignoring ads and not buying anything online business will perceive the net as dead duck as far as business is concerned but this isn't the case. B2C² e-commerce accounts for about 65 billion USD is sales (globaly), whereas B2B³ e-commerce rakes in over 700 billion USD in tranasctions and 12 trillion USD in total commerce, the potential for B2B is huge, so whether customers want business conducted on the web or not business is definitely here to stay (Laudon, K. C. and Traver C. G. (2002). E-commerce: business, technology, society. USA: Addison Wesley).

¹ Quote from Inside the Internet television programme from the Computers Don't Bite television series by the BBC,1997.
² Business to Consumer. Businesses that trade to you and me, like www.amazon.co.uk.
³ Business to Business. Businesses that sell only to other businesses, like www.akamai.com.

How the Internet and the WWW work

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This is an unofficial guide, the information expressed here may differ from Agnitum's. There is a support forum (no longer run by Agnitum, but by users) if you need more help this is a good place to start. Where information here conflicts with what Agnitum have told you always go with the information given to you by Agnitum.

Guide/site and images ©Stephen Cox