Tim Berners-Lee is not a celebrity in the conventional sense, but an “influencer of the zeitgeist” he most cerainly is.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM

He’s the inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), its markup language, HTML, and its protocols, like HTTP. Building on top of the backbone internet created by the US Military and the universites for research-sharing purposes, he created the popular internet of websites and email that most of us know today.

Last week Berners-Lee became a member of the most exclusive club of all : the Order of Merit.

The Order is limited to 24 of the most distinguished people on the planet. It’s in the personal gift of the Queen, not the politicians, so carries far greater kudos than other British honours.

There will be no fuss or fanfare, no procession of the great and the good. The members will wear simple lounge suits, and few onlookers will even notice the cars entering Buckingham Palace this morning, or know that the occupants will have lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip.

Before the main event, the Queen will have a private chat with the newest member, Sir Tim, and present him with his decoration, a small blue and crimson cross with a laurel wreath in the centre and a gold inscription : “For Merit”.

The Order has existed for 105 years and had a total of 174 members. Recipients have included, Thomas Hardy, Sir Edward Elgar, Florence Nightingale, Henry Moore and Sir Winston Churchill. More recently, Margaret Thatcher was made an OM, as was Betty Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons.

It’s a suitable honour for Berners-Lee, whose work is made use of in some way by almost everyone on Earth on a daily basis. It’s hard to think of anyone who has had such an impact on the life of the planet and yet is almost totally unknown. Membership of this elite Order is perhaps the perfect decoration for such a modest man.

The words “For Merit” are well chosen. Today’s world is full of trashy icons with no merit except a talent for self-promotion, yet there are still people out there like Berners-Lee. Their depth of intellect and pioneering spirit are not valued by the majority, or the populist media that serve them.

Dave Winer is an amazing internet innovator, serial blogger, and compelling writer. Involved in the creation of blogging with his long-running site, Scripting.com, he also had a hand in developing RSS and Podcasting. His latest project is an OPML Outliner — something I’m still trying to understand.

I was about to ask him:

Editor You’ve announced your retirement from blogging at the end of this year. Does that mean you now think that blogging is being replaced by other forms of “citizen media”?

Serendipitously, today, this appeared on his blog:

These days when I get an interview request from a professional reporter, I offer to answer the questions, best I can, on my blog, without saying who the reporter is and exactly what questions were asked. This way I create a public record, something that can be useful to anyone, and I avoid the problem of being quoted selectively and out of context. Having created a record that’s likely to be as widely read as the story, I make sure what I have to say has a chance of being heard.

In this case, the question basically is if any trend can be discerned from my decision to stop blogging, on or about the end of this year, and the answer is no, imho.

Blogging is a lifestyle, not something you do inbetween things. For a guy like me, it’s the background, it’s what I do when idle, and when busy, it’s what I think about every waking hour. The lessons I learn from life appear in my weblog, but maybe not so much these days, for a variety of reasons.

I’m what many would call an “A-list blogger,” not by choice, it’s not something I decided to be or something I wanted to be, but because I was first, and the first generation blogs were rooted in my work, and their work formed the roots for the next level, what I write here tends to get a lot more attention than what someone might write at a random blog at Blogspot or Typepad. You might think that’s good, and at times it is good to have such a pulpit. But it also means giving up on some things that are important to me. I don’t want everything I write to be seen as a U.N. Security Council resolution, yet often my posts are read and picked at as if they were formal documents, and they don’t stand up to such treatment.

I’m also a software developer, and part of the satisfaction of blogging for me was writing the software that made it possible, and then creating software and formats that made reading massive amounts of blog material possible (reading is going to be a big deal in the future, as I’ve written earlier this month). I don’t think there’s much room for changing what blogging is, but I do think there’s a chance to create new ways of writing on the net. Key point, if I’m blogging every day, I won’t have the incentive to create new software. Blogging is good enough, but it may be possible to do something richer and more powerful, and I want to find out.

I think there’s a subtext to the questions my professional colleague is asking — can we say that blogging is just a temporary thing, bound to pass as people get tired of it. They seem to keep wanting to see this, but no way, that’s not what’s happening. In fact, blogging is just beginning to come into its own. Yesterday we got the scoop on the news of the terrorist threat from a blogger, Doc Searls. He beat the mainstream reporters, who were (presumably) waiting for official word from the governments, because he was there, at Logan Airport, experiencing the event first-hand. And as the day went on, bloggers posted their accounts of the human view of the events, the eye witnesses, while the pros were (importantly) reporting on the governments. See how the two complement each other? We need both views, and it would do us all good if the pros would stop predicting the demise of blogging, and get busy learning to use blogging in their reporting. It is happening, they are giving up the fight, but every so often I’m asked to defend blogging, which I will never stop doing.

Sylvia, my friend, wrote about my silence at BlogHer, describing me as a parent or grandparent, proud of what his offspring are accomplishing. My blogging voice will go silent, by choice, but I will still be standing behind the medium with every ounce of my being, proud as can be to have helped get something so powerful and empowering started.