I recently watched an episode of the Imagine… TV programme presented by Alan Yentob on the rise of the World Wide Web. One snippet that particularly delighted me was the reference to a Victorian book called ‘Inquire Within Upon Everything’. This is a compendium of advice on every conceivable subject, from alleviating aches and pains to social etiquette. It was the initial inspiration for Tim-Berners Lee when he was developing the software program that was the precursor to the Web – he named it ‘Inquire’ in homage to the book.

I like the idea that the World Wide Web was inspired by an obscure Victorian book. It gives a kind of sense of the continuation and spread of the world’s knowledge from a little-known book to the world wide scale of the Internet.

On a completely different note, I was chatting to Brian Kelly of UKOLN about the wonders of RSS and blogging. However, we agreed that setting up RSS feeds may not be for everyone. You now have an alternative – you can sign up to an RSS email service so that you receive regular emails instead of RSS feeds – read more about this on Brian’s blog – I believe that he’s testing a few out…