• by Laurie Petersen , March 22, 2007

Yes, it's a new face you're seeing on this page, but I'm no stranger to this industry.

My online roots go back to what I'll call Web minus 3.0. I was once business editor for the first interactive foray made by CBS - back when Bill Paley ran the company - and it was called videotex. Paley came to tour our Fair Lawn, N.J., outpost one day to see the service named "Reach," and was enchanted by it.

Paley's favorite part was the "Message Center," where a test audience of 100 Ridgewood families could send each other electronic messages, and check them on their own schedule.

"Message Center" was the most popular feature for Reach users, too. And kids liked the art gallery where they could create their own masterpieces and display them for all to view.

"Reach" was very much a controlled environment of edited and branded content supported by advertising and made as interactive and customizable as the era's technical capabilities allowed.

Anyone involved in the CBS test could foresee elements of the self-expressive, social online world that exists today. But our spec of the future never totally captured how rapidly creative control would shift to the audience once the market, technology, and generation spawned online came together. Nor did we predict an era of total self-exposure.

Welcome to Web 3.0, the focus of this issue. In our cover story, Steve Smith writes about Web 3.0 as the blurring of professional and amateur content and the mingling of media properties and personal lives.

OMMA Magazine gets a new editor this month. Wendy Davis, who has edited MediaPost's Online Media Daily for the past two years, will bring her strong perspective on the players and issues to our pages. Tobi Elkin, meanwhile, continues to cover the industry as an editor-at-large.

Tell us how you define Web 3.0. We want to hear from you.