If you are interested in the future of the web and computing in general, read The Semantic Web in the May issue of Scientific American. Co-authored by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, the article explores the possibilities of having a machine-readable web, rather than a web intended only for human readers. The automation possibilities are fascinating.

The article also touches on some interesting characteristics of the current web. In particular that while the decentralization of the control on the web brought us the dreaded 404 error, it also allowed for the exponential growth. Berners-Lee is an academic and an idealist (I think you have to be an idealist to use a NeXT computer). He intended [em] tags to encode meaning, emphasis, not [i] tags to slant text. The Semantic Web looks to correct that very problem.