Issue 50: Special 50th issue

Web 2.0 Five Years On: Web Squared

Ever since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle first introduced the term ‘web 2.0’, people have been asking, ‘What’s next?’ Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality? It is all of those, and more. The web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, it is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow’, an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications.