Museums, Public Lands, and Billboards:
Toward a Philosophy of the World Wide Web.
Roger B. Blumberg. Second International WWW Conference '94. archive 
It is surprising neither that our discussions of electronic communication invoke images of highways and networks, nor that our arguments about the future of electronic communication frequently concern the verisimilitude of our metaphors.
By adopting the metaphor of public space, we broaden significantly the sorts of concerns important to the design, operation, and use of the Web.
Museums, Public Lands, and Billboards embody features of the sorts of spatial structures that are, and will be, common on the Web, and further, that they draw our attention to the inevitable management questions that both operators and users of the Web are likely to face as the number of users and providers increases.
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Ward Cunningham: My copy of this personally influential work. page
I mention Bloomberg in defending some decisions I made operating my original wiki. I said, I think of Portland Pattern Repository as a privately owned public place. I want people to come visit and enjoy this space so I work hard improving it. My improvements are, in effect, my statement as to what the web should be. Although I admire many other places in the web, I've chosen not to mimic any in a literal way. page