Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

In Part I of this article series, we looked at how the real-time Web has precipitated Nowism as a fundamental shift in how we understand and engage with information. Nowism is a cultural shift to a focus on the present, instead of the past or future. One example of Nowism in action is Nowcasting, which [...]

Introduction The pulse of the Net has gotten faster. It’s not a static Web of documents anymore, it’s a new real-time messaging medium we call the Stream. The Stream is unlike any form of live media before it: It is a completely real-time, globally distributed, two-way conversation. And it’s already changing everything we know about [...]

I’ve noticed a distinct change in how people use Twitter in the last year: 1. People are increasingly not using Twitter for actual two-way conversations or interactions. Instead it’s being used more for one-way “fire and forget” posting. People just post into the aether, without knowing or even caring if anyone actually reads their posts. [...]

This is a talk I’ve been giving on how we filter the Stream at Bottlenose. You can view the slides below, or click here to replay the webinar with my talk. Note: I recommend the webinar if you have time, as I go into a lot more detail than is in the slides – in [...]

Last week Twitter announced changes to their APIs. These changes impose severe limitations on the use of Twitter’s APIs by third-party apps and sites. But beyond just the new limitations, there was a bigger problem with the announcement: Vagueness. The announcement was actually quite vague in many key areas. It left many questions unanswered and [...]

One thing I find quite ironic about the whole Twitter API crackdown is when people try to rationalize it because “Twitter needs to be a multibillion dollar business” or “Twitter must remain an independent company” etc. These kinds of statements just don’t hold water. Twitter CAN in fact make more money, and be more independent, by opening [...]

Bottlenose (disclosure: my startup) just launched the first attention engine this week. But it appears that Bit.ly is launching one soon as well. It’s going to get interesting to watch this category develop. Clearly there is new interest in building a good real-time picture of what’s happening, and what’s trending, and providing search, discovery, and [...]

How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence This article is part 4 in a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch. Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter The Bottlenose Business Concept How Bottlenose Works – A Glimpse Under the Hood How Bottlenose [...]

How Bottlenose Works This article is the third article in a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch. Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter The Bottlenose Business Concept How Bottlenose Works – A Glimpse Under the Hood (you are here) How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and [...]

Bottlenose – The Business Model This is part 2 of a series of articles about the Bottlenose Public Beta launch. Bottlenose – The Now Engine – The Web’s Collective Consciousness Just Got Smarter The Bottlenose Business Concept (you are here) How Bottlenose Works – A Glimpse Under the Hood How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and [...]

Recently, one of Twitter’s top search engineers tweeted that Twitter was set to “change search forever.” This proclamation sparked a hearty round of speculation and excitement about what was coming down the pipe for Twitter search. The actual announcement featured the introduction of autocomplete and the ability to search within the subset of people on [...]

I am writing this article because I love Twitter, and I’ve built a business around making sense of Twitter data. I am concerned by the recent “ominous” signs that Twitter may be heading down a path towards becoming a closed platform — a path that betrays the trust and goodwill given to them by millions [...]

I was recently contacted by a computer scientist, Sergey Bulanov, who has been working quietly for 20 years on a new approach to artificial intelligence. It’s a pretty interesting and novel approach, and I would like to see what others think about it. From what I understand, the essence of Sergey’s approach is a new [...]

Today I had an interesting phone call with an alumnus of my alma mater, Oberlin College. He called me for an informational interview, asking for some career advice. It was a good conversation. At one point, on a tangent, he asked me why I went to Oberlin? It’s a funny story actually. In fact, I [...]

Continuing with the theme I’ve been writing about lately, focused on the growth of the next phase of the Web, what I call “The Stream,” I’ve started to analyze the messages I get on a typical day. First of all, through all the different channels I use, I now receive approximately 13,000 messages a day. [...]

This is Part III of a series of articles on the new era of the Stream, a new phase of the Web. In Part I, The Message is the Medium, I explored the shift in focus on the Web from documents to messages. In Part II, Drowning in the Stream, we dove deep into some of [...]

This is Part II of a three-part series of articles on how the Stream is changing the Web. In Part I of this series, The Message is the Medium, I wrote about some of the shifts that are taking place as the center of online attention shifts from documents to messages. Here in Part II, [...]

Shift Happens A major shift has taken place on the Web. Web pages and Web search are no longer the center of online activity and attention. Instead, the new center of attention is messaging and streams. We have moved from the era of the Web to the era of the Stream. This changes everything. Back [...]

In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort. But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the [...]

I haven’t posted in a while, but this is blog-worthy material. I’ve recently become familiar with the thinking of University of Maryland physicist, James Gates Jr. Dr. Gates is working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry. In the process of his work he’s discovered the presence of what appear to resemble a form of [...]

Bottlenose Beta 2.0 launched today, and it’s pretty innovative. Three good articles came out covering it: ReadWriteWeb – Bottlenose is a 6th Sense for the Social Web SemanticWeb.com – Bottlenose Beta Two Features New Layout, Visuals TechCrunch – Bottlenose 2.0: Taming the “Share-pocalypse” Also Robert Scoble blogged about it on Google+ here. Bottlenose also blogged [...]

I’m really pleased to announce that a startup I helped co-found, Live Matrix, has been acquired by OVGuide, a leading video portal. TechCrunch covered the deal here. The new combined company is a unique powerhouse in the online video space – covering the entire life cycle of online videos from when they are upcoming, to [...]

Today I’m happy to announce the launch of StreamGlider, a new tablet app (initially on iPad) that provides the first live streaming dashboard for keeping up with your interests. TechCrunch just broke the story. The inspiration for StreamGlider was a product that launched in the early 1990′s called Pointcast. Pointcast streamed news, entertainment, ads and [...]

After my former project, Twine.com, was sold, I began to turn my attention to the Next Big Challenge: How to make sense of the growing real-time Web, or what many call, “the Stream.” I could see the writing on the wall, and it was less than 140 characters: Social media’s own success was going to [...]

Today, after almost two years of work in stealth, I am proud to announce the launch of Bottlenose. While I have co-founded and serve on the boards of several other ventures (The Daily Dot, Live Matrix, StreamGlider, and others), Bottlenose is different from all my other projects in that I am also in a full-time [...]

Several years ago my friend Gil Elbaz (CEO of Factual; forefather of Google AdWords) approached me with an ambitious vision – he wanted to create an open not-for-profit crawl of the Web to ensure that everyone would have equal access to a Web-scale search index to build on and experiment with. Search giants like Google [...]

Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious, has launched his newest creation, Jig. At first glance the site seems a bit like Twitter, but it has a different focus. Instead of posting about what you are doing, you post about what you need. Then other people reply with suggestions, ideas, answers, help, or presumably commercial products [...]

The team at Icosystem invited me to try out their new Infomous cloud widget. You can see it on the top of the right column of this blog. It visualizes the concept graph in my blog posts. It has some cool features – click on any topic and explore the related posts. If you sign [...]

Today I’m pleased to announce that, The Daily Dot, our newest “venture production,” has launched into public beta. The Daily Dot is the first of its kind – it’s the Web’s newspaper — the first community newspaper about the Web. We cover the Web like a town paper covers its community. Here’s a video overview [...]

I was interviewed in a number of video segments for a project called The Future of Facebook, part of the Open Foresight initiative by Venessa Miemis and Alvis Brigis. One of the videos was just on CNN. You can see my other segments on my Videos page.