Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

How I Got Into College (by Doing the Opposite of What I Should Have Done). An Essay.

April 12th, 2012

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 [...]

Keeping Up With the Stream — New Problems and Solutions

April 10th, 2012

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 [...]

Drowning in the Stream — New Challenges for a New Web

April 10th, 2012

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, [...]

The Message is the Medium – Attention is Shifting from the Web to the Stream

April 10th, 2012

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 [...]

Consciousness is Not a Computation

March 24th, 2012

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 [...]

Is the Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges.

March 22nd, 2012

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!

February 21st, 2012

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 [...]

StreamGlider Launches Today!

December 21st, 2011

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 [...]

The Problem with Stream 3.0

December 13th, 2011

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 [...]

Bottlenose has Launched!

December 12th, 2011

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 [...]

Announcing Common Crawl

November 7th, 2011

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 [...]

Creator of Delicious Wants to Meet Your Needs With Jig

August 26th, 2011

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 [...]

Check out the new visualization widget on my sidebar

August 23rd, 2011

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 [...]

The Daily Dot – Our Newest Venture Production – Launches Today!

August 22nd, 2011

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 [...]

The Future of Facebook

August 2nd, 2011

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.    

The New Social Media Landscape: A Roadmap

July 20th, 2011

It may look like Google+ is competing with Facebook and Twitter, but I don’t think that is what will happen in the end. I think Google+ is a very different kind of service and it’s not clear that it can or will, or should, replace these other services. In a series of articles here on [...]

[Excerpt From My TechCrunch post] Why Twitter Should Adopt a Freemium API Model Immediately

April 22nd, 2011

TechCrunch kindly ran my most recent article today — the full version is available here. Here is an excerpt: I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in [...]

Bottlenose Begins to Unstealth

April 8th, 2011

It’s been a busy week for the team at bottlenose one of my coolest venture productions. Bottleno.se has developed a very powerful new personalization system that is optimized for making sense of Twitter and other real-time information streams. The product is in alpha and invite beta is planned for June. It began when TechCrunch broke [...]

What the CBS Clicker Deal Means for Live Matrix

March 5th, 2011

Yesterday’s acquisition by CBS of Clicker is great news for one of my ventures, Live Matrix. It shows that what Live Matrix is doing is becoming even more valuable. But that’s just the beginning of the story — Live Matrix is fundamentally different from Clicker. It targets a different, and possibly larger, opportunity. Clicker bills [...]

My Father and Me. A Memoir. For Mayer Spivack (1936 – 2011)

February 14th, 2011

My father, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, in the Kaplan Family House, a beautiful hospice outside of Boston. He passed away, at the young age of 74, after a difficult year and a half battle with colon cancer. During his illness he never lost his spirit of childlike curiosity, enormous compassion, and [...]

Goodbye San Francisco, Hello Los Angeles!

February 4th, 2011

As of this week I am officially based in Los Angeles and I’m already loving it here. I made the decision for many reasons. First of all my wife wanted to move back here – she lived here for 16 years (during which time she produced 11 TV movies), and she has a huge community [...]

The Schedule of the Web: Live Matrix – Launched Tonight

September 12th, 2010

Tonight I am pleased to announce that my next Big Idea has launched. It’s called Live Matrix and I invite you to come check it out. Live Matrix is the schedule of the Web — We help you to find out “What’s When on the Web” — the hottest live online events happening on the [...]

The New Now – How the Realtime Web is Redefining the Present

August 30th, 2010

I had an interesting discussion with Om Malik recently, about the realtime Web, innovation, semantics and the Stream, and the changing nature of the present. Watch the video for the details.

Three Social Networks – A Story in Pictures (humor)

August 30th, 2010

Three social networks View more presentations from Nova Spivack.

Web Intention Deficit Disorder

August 26th, 2010

(Note: Thanks to Gigaom for posting up an excerpted version of this post. I also wanted to share the longer version below for those interested.) ——————————- Introduction The shape of Web 3.0 has finally emerged in the realization of the Stream, something I and others have written about extensively. Twitter and Facebook, among others, through their [...]

Vote for the these SXSW Panels!

August 26th, 2010

Please vote for these SXSW Panels: (voting closed August 27) What We Really Want In Web TV Banking on Big Brands/Celebs for the Web Humans Versus Robots: Who Curates the Real-Time Web? The Future of Conferences: Designing Experiences Social Viewing for Fan Engagement at MTV Anatomy of an Online Video Show 500 People in Your [...]

Time Based Pricing for Internet Content

August 11th, 2010

I am not advocating charging for content online, however, it may be a necessary evil for some content providers to survive. Without subscription revenues the newspaper industry is dying. The same is true for magazine publishers. Online content providers face similar challenges – the cost of doing high-quality editorial is high and the revenues from [...]

Is Live Content More Valuable than On-Demand Content?

May 6th, 2010

I have started blogging about a new concept that I call The Scheduled Web. The Scheduled Web is the next evolution of the Real-Time Web, in which it will become possible to actually navigate the time dimension of the Web more productively. There is a popular misconception that on-demand content, such as archived video, is [...]

The Birth of the Scheduled Web

May 6th, 2010

If 2010 was the year of the Real-Time Web, then 2011 is going to be the year that it evolves into the Scheduled Web. The Real-Time Web happens in the now: it is spontaneous, overwhelming, and disorganized. Things just happen unpredictably and nobody really knows what to expect or what will happen when. The Real-Time [...]

The Digital Generation Gap

April 4th, 2010

We exist in a epoch of great technological change. Within the space of just a few generations we have gone from horse drawn carriages to exploring the outer reaches of our solar system, from building with wood, stone and metals to nanoscale construction with individual atoms, and from manual printing presses and physical libraries, to [...]