Back in 1998 or so, when I was working at a library as a clerk (putting back books on the shelves), I starting reading a book that caught my eye. The book was called something like HTML for Dummies and it was my first exposure to creating content for the web. For those of you who don’t know, HTML is the foundation language of the internet. HTML was by no means an easy thing to learn, but it was not difficult either. My curiosity kept me reading and later that year, I created a site on geocities.com, which as of later this month will be defunct. It kind of makes me a little sad, actually.

The main thing you should know about HTML is that it was a language created to give browsers, like the one you’re using, instructions on how to display text, pictures, links, etc. Most web pages were very simple in nature since the programmer was usually not very good with graphics or the tools to create graphics were expensive, and compression tools to make those images a decent size were nowhere near as good as they are today. Throw in the fact that most people were on dial-up (56k was fast when I was in High School!), and you ended up with a site that looked like this:

The White House home page...back in 1996.

Yeah, that’s the official White House website. Very plain and boring, and not at all like the whitehouse.gov of today. HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language was great though. It allowed people to create pages that could link to other parts of the site, files, and other sites. The ability to go from one page to the other came to be known as “Web Surfing”, I suppose because it was something like catching one wave after another. Soon enough, we had a huge collection of pages that didn’t look very visually appealing, but were all linking to one another and making information accessible to the world.

Yesterday, David Letterman revealed on-air that he was the victim of an extortion plot by a former CBS News employee who was threatening to reveal some rather embarrassing details about him by publishing them in a screenplay unless he paid 2 million dollars. Apparently, Letterman had affairs with female employees on his show and this guy thought he could extort some money from him. Letterman did the right thing by taking things to the authorities. They arrested dirtbag Robert J. “Joe” Halderman on Friday and put him behind bars where he belongs. Here’s what’s interesting, rather than keeping things under wraps after the guys plot was foiled, Letterman decided to confess his wrongdoings on national television!

There are some serious implications to having office affairs, but even more so with your subordinates. I’m not going to go into that. What I want to focus on is transparency. When Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinski in the 90s, no one was able to capitalize on the scandal better than Letterman, who was still  making jokes about the affair in 2001. Maybe Letterman learned form Clinton’s mistakes, but I think his decision to come clean even after the blackmailer was arrested really comes as a result of the type of world we live in NOW.  Whereas Clinton felt that he could lie about his affair and keep his wrongdoings secret, Letterman (and Mark Sanford) realized that access to information and dissemination via social media like blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks make the spread of this information almost inevitable and difficult to cover up, so coming clean was probably the best choice. When people said “honesty is the best policy”, they were just lying. However, transparency is making this a reality. Access to information is making it difficult to lie.