From web 2.0 to the global database

o timo hannay Nature Publishing Group ne of the most articulate of web commentators, Clay Shirky, put it best. During his " Lessons from Napster " talk at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference in 2001, he invited his audience to consider the infamous prediction of IBM's creator, Thomas Watson, that the world market for computers would plateau at somewhere around five [1]. No doubt some of the people listening that day were themselves carrying more than that number of computers on their laps or their wrists and in their pockets or their bags. And that was even before considering all the other computers about them in the room—inside the projector, the sound system, the air conditioners , and so on. But only when the giggling subsided did he land his killer blow. " We now know that that number was wrong, " said Shirky. " He overestimated by four. " Cue waves of hilarity from the assembled throng. Shirky's point, of course, was that the defining characteristic of the Web age is not so much the ubiquity of computing devices (transformational though that is) but rather their interconnected-ness. We are rapidly reaching a time when any device not connected to the Internet will hardly seem like a computer at all. The network, as they say, is the computer. This fact—together with the related observation that the dominant computing platform of our time is not Unix or Windows or