One of the chief aims of Web Science is to take the “mystery” out of the web and to answer questions like “how did the web change the world?”, “why is Wikipedia so popular?” and “who could have predicted Twitter?” In fact, the Web was just one of a whole family of similar technologies with similar aims; of them all, it happened to be in the right place, with the right people, at the right time to achieve the initial take-up that triggered massive popular adoption and gave it the significant role in society that we now take for granted.

The contributors to this blog are the leaders and lecturers on the EPSRC’s Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science at the University of Southampton.