Two articles of interest from last week’s Economist Technology Quarterly -

Watching the Web Grow Up - a surprisingly good overview of the Semantic Web, following a reality check for web 2.0:

“The painfully self-conscious “web 2.0″ movement […] represents the web’s adolescence”

Go with the flow - a fascinating article about how mobile phones can be used to track the flow of people in a city or street. How could libraries use it (presuming the cost wasn’t astronomical)? To work out where new and current library buildings should be placed, and to respond quickly to changing traffic flows.

A lot of this information involves the use of GIS, which as data sets become more prevalent, librarians will need to use more and more. Coupled with metadata, we will be the data miners of the future. It’s worth pointing out that the article on Tim Berners-Lee reminds us that his document about creating the web was called “Information Management: A Proposal”.

Edit: CW discusses Twitter and links to some posts about the future of the Internet on mobile devices. This was also a large part of the Tim-Berners Lee article - the promise of Internet access on non-computer devices is brighter than ever, and will increase Internet access globally.

This isn’t just about increasing access in developing countries (as broadband and computers can be scarce, but more people might have access to a phone in some areas) but in the most developed, too. For example, in Japan there is a preference to communicate via mobile phone - many people use SMS much more than they use computers. It’s actually surprisingly hard to find an Internet cafe in Japan - I didn’t spot many at all on either of my two trips there.

Library catalogues are now increasingly searchable by mobile devices, databases are PDA-enriched and applications like Endnote have mobile versions. What more should libraries and librarians be doing to anticipate this next stage of the Internet?