Sir Tim Berners-Lee stars in Olympics opening ceremony

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, was greeted by cheers on Friday as the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games celebrated his work.

The event showed how digital communications have become part of everyday life via a musical section on the story of Frankie and June, a pair of kids who hook up via social networking on their mobile phones. At the end, Berners-Lee sat in the middle of the Olympic Stadium live-tweeting a message for the occasion:

As well as appearing on Twitter, the message flashed around the stadium, with the letters made up of ‘pixel’ squares set up alongside seats. It reached a television audience estimated at one billion in this way.

Olympics organisers’ decision to honour Berners-Lee placed the digital revolution he helped spark on a level with the Industrial Revolution in changing ordinary lives.

The opening ceremony took British creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness as its theme, and the technological shifts these have generated. It looked at how the invention of iron smelting led to factories, cities and prosperity, and how Berners-Lee’s creation of the web was just as far-reaching.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee at London 2012 Olympics
Sir Tim Berners-Lee live-tweets during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony

The British inventor now works with the UK government on open data, and previously on the data.gov.uk project to share public data. He was also at one time lined up to be a director at a new Institute for Web Science at Southampton University, but this plan was shelved by the coalition government when it got into power.

“The values and achievements of the Olympics will be amplified by the World Wide Web. It will be like millions of digital torches carrying the spirit of the Games to every corner of the world,” Berners-Lee said, according to a report in Pocket-Lint.

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