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Web 2.0 came to describe almost any site, service, or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration right down to the Net's grass roots. That includes blogs and wikis, tags and RSS feeds, del.icio.us and Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube. Because the concept blankets so many disparate ideas, some have questioned how meaningful-and how useful-it really is, but there's little doubt it owns a spot in our collective consciousness. Whether or not it makes sense, we now break the history of the Web into two distinct stages: Today we have Web 2.0, and before that there was Web 1.0.

Which raises the question: What will Web 3.0 look like?

Yes, it's too early to say for sure. In many ways, even Web 2.0 is a work in progress. But it goes without saying that the new Net technologies are always under development - inside universities, think tanks, and big corporations, as much as Silicon Valley start-ups - and blogs are already abuzz with talk of the Web's next generation.

To many, Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web. In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read Web pages as much as we humans can read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we're looking for. "It's a set of standards that turns the Web into one big database," says Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, one of the leading voices of this new-age Internet.