blog.

It's 20 years since the web became a publicly available service on the internet. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look into the humble beginnings of a service which now has over 200 million websites, over 1 trillion unique URLS and 1.6 billion users.

The web was created by the british engineer and computer scientist Tim Berner-Lee in the late 80s early 90s whilst working at CERN in Geneva. Believe it or not this was the first ever web site published by Berner-Lee in 1991 and almost a year later this was the first photo ever published online to advertise the CERN music club.

At the beginning the web was slow to catch on with only scientists publishing pages, in 1993 there were only 130 websites. Amusingly one of the first uses Cambridge University scientists found for the incredible tool they now had at their disposal was to set up a video capture board that took a picture of their coffee pot in the kitchen every second, so they would know if it was worth leaving their labs and walking down 3 flights of stairs for a break. But that did lead to the birth of the web cam, so maybe we should be grateful! 

We've all recently lived through the next evolution of the web - the use of broadband and high speed internet connections. Five years ago only 7% of us had a broadband connection now that is 95.1%, which means more multimedia content has been able to take off - hence YouTube's recent spike in popularity in the last 5 years. 

And what about the future of the web? Well we'll have to wait and see, but at the moment there are still 9 million people in the UK alone who've never used the web. Race Online 2012 and BBC Connect are working to try to change that but we can all help to share the amazing resource Tim Berner-Lee created so that it can keep getting bigger and better!

Virgin Media are launching their latest advertising campaign soon, with none other than the crazed Mexican mouse of Looney Tunes fame as its mascot: Speedy Gonzales.

Now I like Speedy Gonzales. He's efficient, cute and more to the point, quick. Which is why I'm a bit unsure about his appointment as spokesperson for Virgin Media broadband. It's not that quick!

Not that this is a problem limited to Virgin Media. The broadband speeds we're promised (up to 10Mb, for example) are rarely delivered, and internet service providers are getting away with promising the earth but not delivering.

Try it for yourself here. 

With 2Mbps being promised by the government across the UK by the end of the life of the current parliament (the previous deadline was 2012), perhaps a 'middle-of-the-road runner' would have been a more apt choice than good old Speedy

I've just checked the News and have become aware of our new Olympic mascots "Wenlock" and "Mandeville", my first thoughts were "what the heck are those things" but after watching a rather entertaining animation of their creation, i started to realise that they aren't that bad, I mean even if you hate them, you should take pride in what's representing our great country. For once everyone should have some national pride!

Our guest blogger - Mr P. D - work experience student.