THE Internet Hall of Fame isn’t just about pioneers of online technology – it’s a statement of intent for the future.

It’s likely that John Perry Barlow didn’t expect to become a member of the Internet Hall of Fame when he started writing rock lyrics for the band the Grateful Dead back in the 1970s.

But Barlow became entangled with the internet from its earliest days, and made his mark with the publication in 1996 of his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

And now he’s a board member of online activism group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), among other things.

A perfect candidate, in other words, for membership of the Hall of Fame.

The hall of fame itself is a website – internethalloffame.org – where the great and the good of the net are recognised for their work to make it better.

This year’s inductees include Barlow, alongside Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, which eventually became the Firefox browser, and writer and activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this year.

The hall of fame is a spin-off project from the Internet Society, an international non-profit organisation that works to promote open standards and transparency online. Which is exactly the issue Barlow’s declaration document was raising. The hall of fame is as much about promoting the work of the society as it is about recognising great work.

It’s also a symbol of the so-called “open web” – the web that we can all build, the web of pages at URLs that anyone can link to.