Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Great news. Twine is a finalist in the Industry Standard’s Innovation 100 Awards. Twine / Radar Networks was chosen as a finalist in the community category. There will be one “winner” in each category depending on which companies and products receive the most community votes in each category.  You may vote for one company/product in [...]

As well as Twine, I am also enjoying Friendfeed. They are complementary services. Twine is about sharing and discovering information about your interests, and Friendfeed is about keeping up with your friends and what they are up to on the Web. If you want to track me on Friendfeed, you can follow me here.

I have made a screencast that teaches you how to get started using Twine, and explains most of the features, best-practices for using it, and where we are headed with the product. You can read more about it and discuss it with me here. For anyone who is new to Twine, this will be really [...]

I just posted an article on how bookmarking is evolving, in response to the discussion about "Who Bookmarks Anymore?" that I found on Techmeme. Del.icio.us was a start. Twine is taking it somewhere new. Read about it on my public twine, here.

For decades the world has struggled with what to do about unexploded land mines and cluster bombs killing innocent civilians, even years after a conflict has ended. The problem is that a significant percentage (10% – 40% in the case of cluster bombs) of these weapons do not explode when they are deployed, and instead [...]

A new study has found that using a cell phone 2 or 3 times a day while pregnant is potentially harmful to future child development. The risk level is on par with that of alchohol and tobacco. Scientists found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children [...]

This article sheds some light on the history of attempts to find a resolution between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. I found it to be quite educational. There have in fact been numerous attempts to find a solution, but the process has been frozen in a deadlock for 50 years. The Chinese government [...]

You have to see this image.

I got this picture from a friend who received it from a friend who is on the ground in Lhasa right now. Please redistribute, especially to the news media. Things are much worse for the Tibetans than has been reported. Can we help to avoid another Tainanmen?

UPDATE: I posted some further notes on the fact that Twine is in beta, and what “beta” actually means and why we are in beta here. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a critical review of Twine today that identified several known issues the team is working on. These are points well-taken — we certainly understand that Twine [...]

To all my readers — and especially to those of you who have commented or sent me emails — I just wanted to say thanks! I don’t always have time to reply, but I always read everything, and I do try to reply to the messages that are most relevant. As you probably understand, I [...]

This video in support of Obama is the best piece of political advertising I’ve ever seen. And here is a funny parody of a response from the McCain camp (via Bram)

As I blogged earlier, my company’s product, Twine.com, has been nominated as a finalist for the Best Technology Achievement of 2007 in the TechCrunch Crunchies awards. You can vote once per day, per browser, it appears (they have a very scientific voting process it seems), so please cast your vote for Twine (and the Semantic [...]

My mother, Kathleen Spivack, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, recently published her sixth book! My mother taught me how to write. She’s a brilliant writer and poet who teaches widely in the USA and Europe. Congratulations, mom, on a terrific new book of poems!  From the Boston Globe:   INTERNATIONALLY-ACCLAIMED WRITER KATHLEEN SPIVACK PUBLISHES NEW COLLECTION [...]

The Crunchies awards are coming and I hope you will cast your vote for Twine.com! There are several categories where Twine qualifies and I hope you will vote for Twine. You can cast your votes here: http://crunchies.techcrunch.com/

Only now the full horror of the situation in Burma is emerging.

You probably think that Tai Chi is a slow, gentle form of exercise for old people and new agers. But in fact, what most people have seen is extremely watered down and whimpy. The real Tai Chi is a fast, deadly, forceful martial art. But almost nobody teaches it that way in the West. However, [...]

The situation in Burma is far worse than the mainstream media has reported so far. Watch this video that was just smuggled out showing soldiers beating unarmed protesters. There are now reports coming in from eyewitnesses of young school students being shot by the army, masses of injured protestors being cremated alive, and thousands of monks [...]

Note: This is a new kind of online protest that uses blogs to spread a petition globally. To participate, just add your blog by following the instructions in this blog post. This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy [...]

The nation of Myanamar (Burma) is currently ruled by a repressive and corrupt military dictatorship. Past attempts to bring about democracy have met with violent crackdowns by the government, usually against unarmed civilians. In one past incident, approximately 3000 protesters were killed by the military. Now a new situation is developing that could rapidly lead [...]

Check out this fascinating article about a new show on the BBC: ne bright morning in St James’s Park and a stream of tourists approaches Buckingham Palace, where trumpets will shortly herald the Changing of the Guard. In the middle of the crowd walk five very short, very odd-looking men. They carry camcorders, gesticulate wildly, [...]

Let’s hope this is true. That would be seriously exciting! From this source A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light – an achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.   Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 According to Einstein’s special theory [...]

This just in. The Chinese Government, in their ongoing campaign against the Dalai Lama and Buddhism in Tibet, have announced a new law making it illegal for a Buddha to reincarnate without a state permit. This law is designed effectively to put an end to the form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet within one generation. [...]

I just heard some good news from a friend in the investment business about Dice.com, a company that we acquired and helped to grow when I was running EarthWeb with my co-founers Jack and Murray Hidary. It turns out they are raising more than I thought, and at a higher valuation in their IPO. Looks [...]

This is quite an amazing video clip — a news anchorwoman on MSNBC took a heroic stand and refused, on air, to lead with more news about Paris Hilton, despite her fellow anchormen and her producers trying to force her to. They actually almost get into a scuffle as she tries to burn the story [...]

My brother pointed me to this video of some incredible kinetic sculptures by a man who appears to be a modern-day Da Vinci. Watch the video to see what I mean.

Well I took the plunge today and finally joined Twitter. I’ve been resisting it for months because the thought of having yet another stream of messages to keep up with was a bit daunting (I already get over 100 emails a day, not to mention the thousands of RSS posts I read). But anyway, too [...]

John Markoff published an interesting article today in the New York Times about the shift in software and operating systems from the desktop to the Web, in which I am quoted. The article focuses on the rivalry and different styles between Microsoft and Apple’s next-generation projects that attempt to tie desktop operating systems and the [...]

Hey everyone, check out this music: http://www.myspace.com/marinvibes These are the first public recordings by my brother, Marin, a soon-to-be-famous jazz prodigy. Not only is Marin writing great new tunes with a distinctive style, but he also plays every instrument on the recordings. As you will hear on the recording above, that is an impressive feat [...]

From an interesting article in Nature: One of the most fundamental patterns of scientific discovery is the revolution in thought that accompanies a new body of data. Satellite-based astronomy has, during the past decade, overthrown our most cherished ideas of cosmology, especially those relating to the size, dynamics and composition of the Universe. Similarly, the [...]