Unipim

> Interview With Lynne Brindley
A Decade of Innovation Page 18

> Internet Waves

Getting a Little Perspective on Social Networking Page 13

> Database Review

iSEEK: Does It Out-Google Google? Page 32

May 2009
Vol. 26 | Issue 5

News Briefs
ACRL Report Tackles Economic Woes
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Web 3.0: The Next Step for the Internet by MICHAEL BAUMANN

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Cloudera Gets $5 Million From Accel
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TRANSFER Code of Practice Gains Supporters
3

veryone remembers about 5 years ago when sites such as Wikipedia started popping up, and we started hearing the new catchphrase of “Web 2.0” being tossed around. That’s all old news. Now there’s a new and more ephemeral buzzword: Web 3.0. Now that we finally have a handle on Web 2.0, what does Web 3.0 mean? “Web 3.0 is the third decade of the Web, so it’s a period in time; it’s not a technology,” says Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Radar Networks. March 2009 marked the 20th anniversary of “Information Management: A Proposal,” a seminal publication by Tim Berners-Lee that marked the beginnings of the inter-

net as we know it, according to most internet experts. Two decades later, the web is going through a new series of evolutions that the average user might have barely noticed, but it could revolutionize the way we use computers.

A Changing Infrastructure
While Web 2.0 saw a revolution in the democratization of the internet, Spivack says Web 3.0 will usher in a revolution in the construction of the internet itself. “In the third decade of the Web, the focus is going back to the back end and we’re focusing on upgrading the infrastructure of the Web again,” says Spivack. One of the reasons Web 2.0 received so much attention is that its technologies drastically changed

the way the average person connects with the internet, changing everyday users from readers to contributors. The focus of Web 3.0 will be different.

“The big theme of Web 3.0 is to make the Web more understandable to software, whereas