It's easy to see how, in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, a five-day discussion of connectivity and information sharing could be read as a metaphor for a new era of social openness and understanding. That said, the Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference held in May in Budapest, Hungary nonetheless focused largely on nuts and bolts, with tracks devoted to rising trends in electronic security, data mining, and e-commerce. But the most intriguing of the tracks might well have been those about the Semantic Web, Semantic Web services, and the connections between them. The Semantic Web remains in its infancy, but the technologies behind it could still promise to dramatically rewrite the way the Internet operates in the coming years.