Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

The human brain is like an archaeological record. Different layers and functional areas have evolved outwards over time. And now a new layer is evolving. I propose we call this new layer of the brain “the metacortex.” (Note: Metacortex also happens to be the company that Neo worked for in the movie, The Matrix)
The metacortex [...]

Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone, Part 2: The Technical Stuff
In Part-One of this article on TechCrunch, I covered the emerging paradigm of Virtual Assistants and explored a first look at a new product in this category called Siri. In this article, [...]

Barney Pell invited me to a dinner tonight for the founders, funders, and friends of Singularity University tonight at the NASA Ames campus. I’ve been following the progress of the initiative for some time, via Peter Diamandis, who I’ve known since I attended the International Space University program in 1992. Singularity University brings together luminaries [...]

“All reality is virtual” — Terrence McKenna

This is Part II of my article “The Global Brain is About to Wake Up” — about the  realtime Web and how it relates to the emerging Global Brain.
Here I focus mainly on thorny philosophical and scientific speculations about the nature of consciousness, the role it plays in the [...]

The emerging realtime Web is not only going to speed up the Web and our lives, it is going to bring about a kind of awakening of our collective Global Brain. It’s going to change how many things happen on online, but it’s also going to change how we see and understand what the Web [...]

We are so focused on how to improve present-day search engines. But that is a kind of mental myopia. In fact, a more interesting and fruitful question is why do people search at all? What are they trying to accomplish? And is there a better way to help them accomplish that than search?
Instead of finding [...]

I’m testing out a new service that provides a way to make money via Twitter. It’s an insanely viral idea. And they seem to be implementing it tastefully. Quite impressed so far.
I’m going to test it out and see what happens. I invite you to test it out too. Click here.
What I like about the [...]

This is a series of screenshots that demo the latest build of the consumer experience and developer tools for Twine.com’s “T2″ semantic search product. This is still in internal alpha — not released to public yet.
Twine T2 Demo & Dev Tools (Screenshots Series)
View more presentations from Twine.com.

This is the story of Twine.com — our early research (with never before seen screenshots of our early semantic desktop work), and our evolution from Twine 1.0 towards Twine 2.0 (“T2″) which is focused on semantic search.
A Yarn About Twine — ISWC 2009 Keynote — Nova Spivack
View more presentations from Twine.com.

This is a talk I have given many times, on the past, present and future evolution of the Web, and particularly the Semantic Web.

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine
View more presentations from Twine.com.

I have noticed an interesting and important trend of late. The Web is starting to spread outside of what we think of as “the Web” and into “the World.” This trend is exemplified by many data points. For example:

The Web on mobile devices like the iPhone. Finally it’s really usable [...]

(FIRST DRAFT — A Work in Progress. Comments Welcome)
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Print media publications of all kinds — newspapers and magazines –are dying out, as the Web and online advertising take their place. Increasing amounts of what used to be premium content (via paid wire services and databases for example) is now available for free on the Web.
At [...]

In typical Web-industry style we’re all focused minutely on the leading trend-of-the-year, the real-time Web. But in this obsession we have become a bit myopic. The real-time Web, or what some of us call “The Stream,” is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. So what will it enable, where is [...]

My friend Gil Elbaz is launching Factual today. It's a new service that aims to aggregate spreadsheet style data from around the Web to create a vast open database of facts. Interesting stuff. Check it out. Here's the TechCrunch coverage.

The panel picker for SXSWi went live this morning, and Twine has propsed several submissions. Browsing through the huge list of proposals (over 2200), it’s clear that the Semantic Web will be popular topic at this year’s conference.
With “Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web,” we are planning to offer both an overview of the [...]

The BBC World Service’s Business Daily show interviewed the CTO of Xerox and me, about the future of the Web, printing, newspapers, search, personalization, the real-time Web. Listen to the audio stream here. I hear this will only be online at this location for 6 more days. If anyone finds it again after that let [...]

The next generation of Web search is coming sooner than expected. And with it we will see several shifts in the way people search, and the way major search engines provide search functionality to consumers.
Web 1.0, the first decade of the Web (1989 – 1999), was characterized by a distinctly desktop-like search paradigm. The overriding [...]

DRAFT 1 — A Work in Progress
Introduction
Here’s an idea I’ve been thinking about: it’s a concept for a new philosophy, or perhaps just a name for a grassroots philosophy that seems to be emerging on its own. It’s called “Nowism.” The view that now is what’s most important, because now is where one’s life actually [...]

Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone, Part 2: The Technical Stuff

In Part-One of this article on TechCrunch, I covered the emerging paradigm of Virtual Assistants and explored a first look at a new product in this category called Siri. In this article, Part-Two, I interview [...]

May 8, 2009
Welcome to The Stream
The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of [...]

(DRAFT 2. A Work-In-Progress)
The Problem: Our Communities are Failing
I’ve been thinking about community lately. There is a great need for a new and better model for communities in the world today.
Our present communites are not working and most are breaking down or stagnating. Cities are experiencing urbanization and a host of ensuing  social and economic [...]

(DRAFT 7. Work-In-Progress)
What is the universe and where does it come from?
There are two major schools of thought on this question:

Science: One is modern-day science, which takes the position that universe is strictly a physical phenomenon and that everything about can be explained by repeatable physical measurements, testable scientific theories, and the rules of math [...]

We’ve integrated Twine and Twitter so you can “tweet what you twine” — it’s surprisingly easy and cool. Try it!

I am worried about Twitter. I love it the way it is today. But it’s about to change big time, and I wonder whether it can survive the transition.
Twitter is still relatively small in terms of users, and most of the content is still being added by people. But not for long. Two things are [...]

The Web is 20 years old this month. The third decade of the Web has started. This means we are officially in Web 3.0 now. Web 2.0 is finished. Read more about this definition of Web 3.0 as the third-decade of the Web, here.

I’ve written a new article about how content distribution has evolved, and where it is heading. It’s published here: http://www.siliconangle.com/social-media/content-distribution-is-changing-again/.

Notes:
- This article last updated on March 11, 2009.
- For follow-up, connect with me about this on Twitter here.
- See also: for more details, be sure to read the new review by Doug Lenat, creator of Cyc. He just saw the Wolfram Alpha demo and has added many useful insights.
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Introducing Wolfram Alpha
Stephen Wolfram is [...]

Challenges Twitter Will Face
As I think about Twitter more deeply, one thing that jumps out to me is that in each wave of messaging technology, the old way is supplanted by a new way that is faster, more interactive, and has less noise. And then noise inevitably comes again and everyone moves to a new [...]

The World is Getting Faster
In the world of Twitter things happen in real-time, not Internet-time. It’s even faster than the world of the 1990’s and the early 2000’s.
Here’s an interesting timeline:

In the 1980’s the fax machine made snailmail almost obsolete. Faxing was faster.
In the 1990’s email made faxing almost obsolete. Email was faster.
In the 2000’s [...]

Why Your Brand or Company Should be Watching Twitter
Messages spread so virally and quickly in Twitter when they are “hot” that there
is almost no time to react. It’s at once fascinating to watch, and be a part of, and terrifying. It’s almost too “live.” There is no time to even think. And this is what [...]