Centernetworks reports that San Francisco-based Loomia has closed a $5M Series A round of funding today to accelerate Loomia’s rapid growth, including continuing the build-out of its world-class recommendations platform and expanding its sales and marketing efforts in the U.S. and internationally. Read Loomia’s press release here.

The round was led by venture capital firm, Asset Management Company, and two strategic investors: Peacock Equity, the joint venture between GE and NBC Universal, and Telefónica Capital S.A.U.

Other players in the same market include Aggregate Knowledge ($25M raised), ChoiceStream ($13.1M in Series B), Criteo (€10M), recently acquired CleverSet (sold for $10M) and of course MyStrands ($55M raised).

If web 2.0 could be summarised as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalisation writes Jemima Kiss in a very interesting article on The Guardian.

Sramana Mitra has also covered the topic several times, and she recently described Web 3.0 as a summation of context, community, commerce, content, vertical search and personalization. In the end, new brands able to build deep, rich, highly personalized Web 3.0 user experiences would become Google’s real competition.

Here at MyStrands we obviously believe that the future of the web is personalization. And there is more… this is a slide where we’ve talked about some “Web 3.0″ trends as we see them.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports today that Corvallis born recommendation company CleverSet is selling out to Art Technology Group for $10 million (CEO Todd Humphrey writes about it in CleverSet’s blog).

Other players in the same market include Aggregate Knowledge ($25M raised), ChoiceStream ($13.1M in Series B), recently funded Criteo (€10M) and of course MyStrands ($55M raised).

We wish CleverSet’s founder Bruce D’Ambrosio and the entire team the best for the future, and look forward to creative collaborations again this summer.