Tim Berners-Lee, the man who actually invented the World Wide Web, was honored this week with the Millennium Technology Prize. I’ve never heard of the award but it’s given by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation and comes with a check for one million euros.

I can think of few people who deserve it more. Berners-Lee is one of the few people in this world not trying to make a buck off the Web. Instead he has been working hard to develop standards that would allow anyone to easily and freely communicate over the network (and not just folks using operating systems blessed by the Big Monopoly in hell Redmond).

Side notes: Can it be that the web was only invented 13 years ago? If you want an excellent account of how it all came to be, read Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web.