Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

I’m here at the BlogTalk conference in Cork, Ireland with a range of bloggers and technologists discussing the emerging social Web. Including myself, Ian Davis and Paul Miller from Talis, there are also a bunch of other Semantic Web folks including Dan Brickley, and a group from DERI Galway. Over dinner a few of us [...]

I am pleased to announce that my company Radar Networks, has raised a $13M Series B investment round to grow our product, Twine. The investment comes from Velocity Interactive Group, DFJ, and Vulcan. Ross Levinsohn — the man who acquired and ran MySpace for Fox Interactive — will be joining our board. I’m very excited [...]

There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence over the years. And recently it seems there has been a resurgence in interest in this topic in the media. But artificial intelligence scares me. And frankly, I don’t need it. My human intelligence is quite good, thank you very much. And as far as [...]

My company’s product, Twine.com, has made it to the finalist round in the Crunchies, a new annual tech industry awards competition, under the Best Technical Achievement category. Please help us win by casting your vote for Twine here. Thanks! UPDATE: It turns out, that for some odd reason the Crunchies allows each voter to vote [...]

Jim Hendler, who co-created the OWL language of the Semantic Web has written an interesting post where he comes out with his refutation against criticisms of the Semantic Web.

Now that I have been asked by several dozen people for the slides from my talk on "Making Sense of the Semantic Web," I guess it’s time to put them online. So here they are, under the Creative Commons Attribution License (you can share it with attribution this site). You can download the Powerpoint file [...]

The New Scientist just posted a quick video preview of Twine to YouTube. It only shows a tiny bit of the functionality, but it’s a sneak peak. We’ve been letting early beta testers into Twine and we’re learning a lot from all the great feedback, and also starting to see some cool new uses of [...]

The most interesting and exciting new app I’ve seen this month (other than Twine of course!) is a new semantic search engine called True Knowledge. Go to their site and watch their screencast to see what the next generation of search is really going to look like. True Knowledge is doing something very different from [...]

Google’s recent announcement of their OpenSocial API’s appears to be a new form of middleware for connecting social networks together. But it’s too early to tell, since the technical details are not available yet. The notion of a middleware service for connecting social networks and sharing data between them makes a lot of sense, and [...]

Last night I saw that the video of my presentation of Twine at the Web 2.0 Summit is online. My session, "The Semantic Edge," featured Danny Hillis of Metaweb demoing Freebase, Barney Pell demoing Powerset, and myself Demoing Twine, followed by a brief panel discussion with Tim O’Reilly (in that order). It’s a good panel [...]

What a week it has been for Radar Networks. We have worked so hard these last few days to get ready to unveil Twine, and it has been a real thrill to show our work and get such positive feedback and support from the industry, bloggers, the media and potential users. We really didn’t expect [...]

My company, Radar Networks, has just come out of stealth. We’ve announced what we’ve been working on all these years: It’s called Twine.com. We’re going to be showing Twine publicly for the first time at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. There’s lot’s of press coming out where you can read about what we’re doing in [...]

News Flash! My company, Radar Networks, is coming out of stealth this Friday, October 19, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. I’ll be speaking on "The Semantic Edge Panel" at 4:10 PM, and publicly showing our Semantic Web online service for the first time. If you are planning to come to Web [...]

Tim O’Reilly, recently blogged another article about Web 2.0 Versus Web 3.0 in which he responded to some of my points about what Web 3.0 is and is not. There are several points in his post that I need to respond to. Here is what I am going to cover in this article: Correcting some [...]

Jason just blogged his take on an official definition of "Web 3.0" — in his case he defines it as better content, built using Web 2.0 technologies. There have been numerous responses already, but since I am one of the primary co-authors of the Wikipedia page on the term Web 3.0, I thought I should [...]

I’ve been tracking the progress of my Burma protest meme. In just under one week it has spread to almost 17,000 web pages and it continues to grow. (For the latest number, click here). It’s great to see the blogosphere pick this up, and I’m glad to be able to do something to help raise [...]

I have a lot of respect for the folks at Gartner, but their recent report in which they support the term "Web 2.0" yet claim that the term "Web 3.0" is just a marketing ploy, is a bit misguided. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The term Web 2.0 is in fact just a [...]

I’m posting this in response to a recent post by Tim O’Reilly which focused on disambiguating what the Semantic Web is and is not, as well as the subject of Collective Intelligence. I generally agree with Tim’s post, but I do have some points I would add by way of clarification. In particular, in my [...]

This is a really great invention — a hand held water bottle that can purify a year’s worth of water. It removes not only parasites and bacteria, but also viruses. It was just announced recently at a defense industry tradeshow and was a big hit among military commanders who need a better way to get [...]

I’ve been looking around for open-source libraries (preferably in Java, but not required) for extracting data and metadata from common file formats and Web formats. One project that looks very promising is Aperture. Do you know of any others that are ready or almost ready for prime-time use? Please let me know in the comments! [...]

Microsoft’s Astoria project has decided to make RDF a lower priority and is not supporting it for now. So much for Microsoft participating in the Semantic Web. The Astoria project page describes the project thusly: The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be [...]

A security researcher has figured out a novel way to compromise the security of messages traveling in the Tor anonymizer network. Messages in the Tor network are encrypted as they travel from node to node to their final destination. But the last node has to decrypt the messages before it can deliver them to their [...]

I’ve been poking around in the DBpedia, and I’m amazed at the progress. It is definitely one of the coolest (launched) example of the Semantic Web I’ve seen. It’s going to be a truly useful resource to everyone. If you haven’t heard of it yet, check it out!

Inventor, John Kanzius, has figured out a way to burn salt water. This could provide a clean, naturally available alternative fuel source. Salt water is one of the most abundant natural resources on our planet. Here’s a video.

A very cool experiment in virtual reality has shown it is possible to trick the mind into identifying with a virtual body: Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back – a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them. When the researchers stroked [...]

Researchers at the International Space University (ISU), of which I am an alumnus, are proposing an interesting initiative to build an ark on the moon to preserve human civilization and biodiversity, and the Internet, in the event of a catastrophe on earth, such as a comet impact, nuclear war, etc. This project is similar to [...]

I’ve been thinking for several years about Knowledge Networking. It’s not a term I invented, it’s been floating around as a meme for at least a decade or two. But recently it has started to resurface in my own work. So what is a knowledge network? I define a knowledge network as a form of [...]

A new finding has discovered that the human genome may be highly networked. That is, genes do not operate in isolation, but rather they are networked together in a far more complex ecosystem than previously thought. It may be impossible to separate one gene from another in fact. This throws into question not only our [...]

Peter Royal got me interested in GRDDL recently. It looks like something we may want to use here at Radar Networks for scraping data from the Web and turning it into RDF triples. After doing a little digging around lately, I’m wondering if there is a list of sites that support GRDDL yet? Or any [...]

Recent research has found a way to reverse the Casimir force, which causes objects to stick together at nanoscales. This enables nanoscale levitation — among other things it could dramatically reduce friction in nanodevices. It could also enable new kinds of nanodevices in which for example rotating parts are levitated and held in place using [...]