World Wide Web Virtual Library
The World Wide Web Virtual Library was the first index of content on the World Wide Web and still operates as a directory of e-texts and information sources on the web. It was started by Tim Berners-Lee creator of HTML and the World Wide Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial index sites, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "WWWVL", the "Virtual Library" or just "the VL".
Global brain
Although some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century and were written about by many others before him, the term “global brain” was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book "The Global Brain". How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986. The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995, while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996.