When Tim Berners-Lee invented the web he anticipated that we'd all want to write as well as read. The first web browser could edit web pages as well as display them. Later browsers also allowed ordinary users to do it themselves - until Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, decided that the mass of internet users wouldn't want to do that and stripped the edit function out. Bill Gates left it out when he launched Explorer.
So, designing websites became the province of geeks and design professionals. Berners-Lee's vision of the web as Platonic "inter-creative" playground was indefinitely deferred. Blogging has changed all that, though. The web is now properly "writable" again and people who found their voices in their weblogs are now ready for more. We're watching a renaissance of personal creativity - not of formal artistic creation, you'll understand, but for the informal, weekend and spare time stuff - for travel photography, essay writing and home video; for music making, recipes and table-top animation.
Meanwhile, the tools of creation - the cameras, the PCs and home studios - have multiplied and got so cheap as to be practically disposable. Historic bottlenecks - bandwidth, storage and CPU - have practically gone away. So what's stopping us exchanging our work?
It's not for want of enthusiasm. It's more likely the simple absence of tools. Creating and storing media files is now easy. Exchanging them, though, is a different story.
The big guys - the media owners and software developers - have invested millions in distribution methods for their expensive content, some adding technology to control its use even after it's got to our hard disk.
At the amateur end of the market, though, we're stuck with a short list of ancient technologies, several of which require a PhD in computer science to operate them. Have you ever set up and administered an FTP server? Enough said.
What we need is a new layer of software tools to finish off the otherwise quite slick personal creativity supply chain. Some simple ways of making big media files available to your family and friends without paying for hosting, running a web server or going grey at the temples. Early examples are here but all are imperfect - BitTorrent is a free P2P file sharing tool used exten sively by naughty kids to exchange "warez" (pirate software) and a quite viable way of circulating even very big files (like digital video) among a small community but there's no easy way of finding BitTorrent files right now.
Creo's Tokens is a neat way of swapping files machine-to-machine. Ideal if your audience is limited to a handful and clever enough to go round firewalls, but Tokens needs your machine to be online constantly.
But the next wave of personal creativity tools is on its way - and will probably have distribution built in. The revolution will be televised after all.
