Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here.
This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer [...]

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, [...]

“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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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/.

If you are interested in semantics, taxonomies, education, information overload and how libraries are evolving, you may enjoy this video of my talk on the Semantic Web and the Future of Libraries at the OCLC Symposium at the American Library Association Midwinter 2009 Conference. This event focused around a dialogue between David Weinberger and myself, [...]

If you are interested in collective intelligence, consciousness, the global brain and the evolution of artificial intelligence and superhuman intelligence, you may want to see my talk at the 2008 Singularity Summit. The videos from the Summit have just come online.
(Many thanks to Hrafn Thorisson who worked with me as my research assistant for [...]

Twine has been growing at 50% per month since launch in October. We've been keeping that quiet while we wait to see if it holds. VentureBeat just noticed and did an article about it. It turns out our January numbers are higher than Compete.com estimates and February is looking strong too. We have a slew [...]

In this interview with Fast Company, I discuss my concept of "connective intelligence." Intelligence is really in the connections between things, not the things themselves. Twine facilitates smarter connections between content, and between people. This facilitates the emergence of higher levels of collective intelligence.

Kevin Kelly recently wrote another fascinating article about evidence of a global superorganism. It’s another useful contribution to the ongoing evolution of this meme.
I tend to agree that we are at what Kevin calls, Stage III. However, an important distinction in my own thinking is that the superorganism is not comprised just of machines, but [...]

UPDATE: There’s already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.
I’ve been writing about a new trend that I call “interest networking” for a while now. But I wanted to take the opportunity before the public launch of Twine on Tuesday (tomorrow) to reflect on the state of this [...]

I’ve posted a link to a video of my best talk — given at the GRID ‘08 Conference in Stockholm this summer. It’s about the growth of collective intelligence and the Semantic Web, and the future and role the media. Read more and get the video here. Enjoy!

I’ve posted a new article in my public twine about how we are moving from the World Wide Web to the Web Wide World. It’s about how the Web is spreading into the physical world, and what this means.

Video from my panel at DEMO Fall ‘08 on the Future of the Web is now available.
I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:
Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.
Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD, Head of Research and [...]

This is an older version of this article. The most recent version is located here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_desktop.php
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I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I’ve [...]

I have been thinking about the situation in the Middle East and also the rise of oil prices, peak oil, and the problem of a world economy based on energy scarcity rather than abundance. There is, I believe, a way to solve the problems in the Middle East, and the energy problems facing the world, [...]

Here is the full video of my talk on the Semantic Web at The Next Web 2008 Conference. Thanks to Boris and the NextWeb gang!

John Mills, one of the engineers behind Twine, recently wrote up an interesting article discussing our approach to semantic tags. It’s a good read for folks who think about the Semantic Web and tags.

I have been thinking a lot about social networks lately, and why there are so many of them, and what will happen in that space.
Today I had what I think is a "big realization" about this.
Everyone, including myself, seems to think that there is only room for one big social network, and it looks like [...]

Our present day search engines are a poor match for the way that our brains actually think and search for answers. Our brains search associatively along networks of relationships. We search for things that are related to things we know, and things that are related to those things. Our brains not only search along these [...]

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who’s Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about “Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web.”
Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you [...]