The inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), its markup language, HTML, and its protocols, like HTTP, will today become a member of the most exclusive club of all.

Some members of the Order of Merit

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a modest Englishman who arguably did more to create the internet than anyone else — especially the boastful Al Gore — will today receive the Order of Merit from the Queen. The Order is limited to 24 of the most distinguished people on the planet. It’s in the personal gift of the Queen, not the politicians, so carries far greater kudos than the buyable baubles dished out to friends of Downing Street.

There will be no fuss or fanfare, no procession of the great and the good. The members will wear simple lounge suits, and few onlookers will even notice the cars entering Buckingham Palace this morning, or know that the occupants will have lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip.

Before the main event, the Queen will have a private chat with the newest member, Sir Tim, and present him with his decoration, a small blue and crimson cross with a laurel wreath in the centre and a gold inscription : “For Merit”.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM

The Order has existed for 105 years and had a total of 174 members. Recipients have included, Thomas Hardy, Sir Edward Elgar, Florence Nightingale, Henry Moore and Sir Winston Churchill. More recently, Margaret Thatcher was made an OM, as was Betty Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons.

It’s a suitable honour for Berners-Lee, whose work is made use of by almost everyone on Earth on a daily basis. It’s hard to think of anyone who has had such an impact on the life of the planet and yet is almost totally unknown. No Paris Hilton he. Membership of this elite Order is perhaps the perfect decoration for such a modest man.

The words “For Merit” are well chosen. Today’s world is full of trashy icons with no merit except a talent for self-promotion. Many crash and burn like the flimsy creations they are. Yet there are still people out there like Berners-Lee, but their depth of intellect and pioneering spirit are not valued by many, or the populist media that serve them.

Thankfully Britain still has ways of celebrating them, albeit with a small cross and lunch with the Monarch and peers of their merit.

Syntagma salutes Sir Tim, OM, and celebrates his achievements.

The former editor of The Blog Herald, Abe Olandres, has had to relinquish his post because of an allegedly malicious legal case brought against his small web hosting business. The fault was not his, but has already cost him the price of a house in legal fees.

There’s a fund being set up at The Blog Herald to offset some of the pain of this case. If each BH reader sends $10 via PayPal, it would go a long way towards that. Syntagma Media has contributed $100 to the fund. If you want to contribute, the PayPal address is:

theblogherald(at)gmail(dot)com

Here’s Abe’s story :

I run a fairly small start-up web hosting here in the Philippines. One of our former clients runs a forum that we used to host. Several members of that forum were throwing vindictives against a their former employer. That employer sent us a demand letter thru their law firm demanding that we terminate the site or be charged with libel as well. The client moved out from us the following day. However, the employer/complainant has now filed several libel law suits against us claiming that we are the owner of the domain and the operator of the site. The site is still up and running though hosted somewhere else, the domain was also transferred away from us. Still, the complainant is alleging we should have enforced some sort of regulations or control over the content when it was still with us.

It could happen to any of us who publish user-generated content on the internet.

I’ve been following the travails of some blogfreaks who have piled into Wordpress 2.1 while it’s still wet behind the ears. Not a pretty sight (or “site” — either will do).

I’ve also read a few posts on what it contains. Very impressive. But one “improvement” caught my sparrowhawk eye : changes in the table structure of the database which may cause some favourite features to implode.

Call me old fashioned, but it’s that word “implode” which jumps out at me. I’m an old hand at imploding websites, probably having imploded more than the average online tinkerer. One thing I know about implosions — they are virtually impossible to get out of without starting again at the very beginning.

Imploding 50 Wordpress websites is definitely not on my list of priorities.

So the Wordpress team, or community, as open-sourcers prefer to call themselves, can keep their implosions to themselves. Thanks, but no thanks, guys.

All is not totally lost, though. One of the Wordpresseers, Lorelle VanFossen, has compiled a magnificent article on the trials and tribulations of 2.1. It contains enough hard information and instructions to put me off for several lifetimes.

Update : You thought I was going to chicken out, didn’t you? Well, I’ve just updated our test site to Wordpress 2.1 with no problems at all, except that our version of “Subscribe to Comments” doesn’t work. There doesn’t seem to be a problem with the database either, updating from 2.0.5.

I think the problems stated in the articles are for high-tech users who run very sophisticated scripts and plugins. But, for us, no implosions yet, although I can’t get the call to the sidebar to work in the single post template. Any ideas, anyone?

Google PageRank
Jumping quickly back to the Google PR regrade. All of our newer sites now have PR4, and some later ones have regressed to that. The Google dance is still going on, apparently.

However, I’m noticing that many other sites have been pulled back — even The Blog Herald has lost its PR7 and recoils to a 6. There’s clearly something in the new algorithm which penalizes interlinked networks and possibly text link ads too.

As a commercial network, we’ll just have to accept that the Google model index is now downgrading business and blog networks.

You have a choice, it seems : you can have great PR in the poorhouse, or you can earn income with a poor PR.

Take the money and run.

I’ve been reading on average around two books a week since childhood. I started at age 3 with Enid Blyton novels, rose to Dostoievsky at 13, and have continued ever since. If I live out the average lifetime, though, I will have read only 7,500 books when I enter the pearly gates.

But will St Peter be impressed? If I were the old gatekeeper I’d point out that more that 100,000 new titles are published each year in Britain alone. Add on the rest of the world, and each year’s totals to date, plus the sum of all ancient manuscripts and codices, and you’ll probably arrive at an eight or nine-figure number.

A mere 7,500 is so piffling as to be almost worthless. Strip out the Enid Blyton’s and the Richmal Crompton’s of childhood reading, plus all the other useless tomes and trashy novels read since, and really, old boy, you have virtually no education at all!

I was set to musing on these depressing thoughts after a visit to Waterstones, the biggest bookshop in town yesterday. I was determined to buy a really great book to read over the weekend. After a quick survey of the latest pulp fiction, the newest sensational stuff from the Dan Brown brigade, the huge pile of “Jesus was a Married Martian” nonsense, I passed on with some relief to the non-fiction shelves.

First, history … well, what could possibly be new or fresh in that? Even Andrew Roberts has been reduced to rewriting Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Philosophy, the same — I’d read the latest Roger Scruton, so not much there. Science? Nah … same ole, same ole. Black ole, to be precise.

But technology, surely, must have something new to say? You are joking? All the computer books are way out of date. There was even a large, floppy volume on Microsoft Office 1997 — a bestseller still, apparently.

In the entire bookshop there wasn’t a single title that I hadn’t already flipped through or actually wanted passionately to read. I was bookless in Waterstones.

So despite the woe-begone state of my lifetime’s reading score and my determination to improve it, the world of print publishing couldn’t provide a single instance of something I wanted to read. How crazy is that?

The truth is, there are only so many subject areas you can write a saleable book about. In my years of avid consumption I had apparently exhausted all of them. So, my pifflingly small reading total compared to the billions of titles available is actually much better than old Peter might think. Some shrewd background selectivity has been driving it for years.

I’d obviously extracted the core of human knowledge and speculation and I’m now destined to go round in circles over the same ground for the rest of my days. There must be some Greek god who matches that description.

Where does that leave the content business? It reveals that content, both online and offline, is constantly repeating itself with massive overduplication of material and ideas. Sure, things get shifted round a lot, as in a kaleidoscope, but the central core of all types of content is just a dance of elements trying to present old material as new and original.

Of course, old principles need to be interpreted anew for succeeding generations, but the tidal waves of content we’re now faced with on a daily basis is largely fraudulent.

How often do you get that sinking feeling when viewing your feed reader? Deja vu always overwhelms me when I look at techmeme. Despite being the best snapshot of tech news on the internet, anything but short-term memory reveals the cyclical nature of so-called news.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t read everything. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read 0.01% of everything. Education is choosing what to retain and making sense of it. The other 99.99% recurring is largely superfluous.

From an author’s point of view, the situation is not encouraging. Given the enormous duplication of effort, how much more can content expand, especially on the internet, while retaining value that can be collected by the creator?

We’re already seeing content come close to zero price in many areas. And with copyright laws getting ever looser, newer ways of digging gold from them tha’ mountains of content are urgently needed.

As I write, Valleywag is reporting that “AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from … Jason Calacanis”. Only three WeblogsInc titles are really profitable : Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. The rest are not profitable enough. Nick Denton, the writer of the piece remarks : “I also have an aesthetic aversion to those blog networks which measure success in the quantity of titles rather than the quality of the writing.”

I think we can all agree on that.