There are two quotes that I often think about that I think describe the power of the web. They may be more relevant today than ever.

The first one is from Stewart Brand. He once said “information wants to be free.”

Twenty years later, Molly Holzschlag said that “blogging is an act of courage.”

Together, they help to define a long, continuous practice on the web with regards to spreading information.

Brand used the phrase “information wants to be free” as early as 1984, in a conversation with Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers conference. As with most widely attributed quotes, there is a more nuanced second half to it.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Brand was a technologist, and I would go as far as to say an optimist as well. By 1984, he had already created the wry, pointed and technology-infused Whole Earth Catalog. He was at work on a new online community, the WELL, which served as a prototype for decades more of digital communities.

In his work, Brand had uncovered the innate tension of information that he described for Wozniak. It is the most valuable thing that we have. That value provides incentives to lock information up, but it also is bursting at the seams, wanting to get out. Humans always find a way to share information with one another.

This is something that Tim Berners-Lee believes deeply as well.

Brand was a major influence for Tim Berners-Lee in the years leading up to his creation of the World Wide Web. You can even see that in his choice for a name for the original proposal of the web. He called it “Information Management: A Proposal.”

The original problem the web was solving was freeing up information for researchers at CERN. Berners-Lee worked at CERN were there were near daily scientific discoveries. But every researchers had their own idiosyncratic way of storing and sharing this research. Berners-Lee developed the web partially as a way to create easy and common pathways to this information for every researcher. He describes this necessity in his first proposal.

In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information.

Information, in other words, wants to be free. And that underpinned the philosophy of the early web. It led CERN to make an important decision, and release the web’s protocols into the public domain for everyone to use. The amount of information that’s been shared and compiled as a result of the web is incalculable. It’s one of the greatest achievements of modern history.

Much of this traveled through personal sites and message boards. It didn’t necessarily matter if you were a subject matter expert or an enthusiastic hobbyist. The web was a place where you could put some information out there in an attempt to connect others to it. Before the web, there was a limit to how far that information could go. After the web, it became limitless.

All of this coalesced into a blogging movement that began almost as early as the web did, and took off in the early 2000’s. A blogging movement that standards advocate and web pioneer Molly Holzschlag referred to in 2005 when she wrote “Blogging is an act of courage.” At the time, she was writing about individuals inside of larger tech companies willing to be transparent about the work they were doing. But she used that to make a much more broad point about blogging.

if you want a blog to be interesting… it has to be personal, authentic and even controversial. Otherwise, don’t blog – it’s not going to be interesting.

Courage is interesting. Stepping out of the expected is interesting. Facilitating change is interesting. Publishing legalese and press releases is not interesting, nor is it very courageous.

Holzschlag concisely and poignantly sums up a necessary condition for information. It takes an Individual with courage to share it. There needs to be a willingness.

And that’s because blogging is just a technology that creates connections between people. Berners-Lee always thought about the web this way too. If you set information free, it doesn’t mean much unless it’s shared with others. “A single piece of information is meaningless,” he said in a speech at the first convention for the World Wide Web, “in an extreme view, the world can be seen only as connections between information.”

All these years later, Berners-Lee hasn’t much changed his view. In his recent book, This is For Everyone, Berners-Lee describes the power of setting information free. And importantly, he also connects that to the importance of human beings connecting to one another.

What you wanted, instead, was to encourage new and unexpected relationships between pieces of information to flourish. And, to do that, you had to let the users make those connections, in any way they saw fit

Connections.

We have to be willing to share the truth in order for information to get out. It costs everyone something to do that, a little piece of themselves. But that piece has an ability to spread out and take shape amongst all of the other pieces out there.

It is because information is free that blogging can be an act of courage.

One of the most incredible things about blogging is that it remains, in many ways, unchanged. It is still a deeply personal pursuit, still largely text, still outside the mainstream media, still shared a bit messy and unorganized at times, still without consistent format. In the twenty years since Holzschlag wrote about it. no one has succeeded in commodifying blogging in such a way that has robbed its spirit. It remains very much intact and personal.

The intellectual chains of thought—the connections between blogs—remain intact as well. This post is at least partially in response to the case for blogging made by JA Westenberg recently (I suggest you all read that one as well). We won’t be able to get rid of blogging until we get rid of the connections that it creates. And those are so fundamental to the web, that they are not going away. Or at least, many of us will do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t.

Share information, freely. Blog.