Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

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 [...]

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 were [...]

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 [...]

It’s been an interesting month for news about Radar Networks. Two significant articles came out recently:
Business 2.0 Magazine published a feature article about Radar Networks in their July 2007 issue. This article is perhaps the most comprehensive article to-date about what we are working on at Radar Networks, it’s also one of the better articulations [...]

The folks at Read/Write Web have a great analysis of AOL’s recent move to support the OpenID initiative. AOL has integrated with OpenID, adding 63 million users in a bid to make AIM handles sticky.
Digg also just announced they are joining OpenID.
OpenID is one of the technologies that I am tracking as a key [...]

Tom Hayes has an interesting post in which he coins the word ‘beme" to mean a meme that spreads in the blogosphere.
Michael Malone’s ABC News column on Thursday mentioning "bemes" has certainly produced a lot of interest.  Originally, I coined the word beme
to describe a meme propagated by blogs and bloggers.  Now I can [...]

It’s been a while since I posted about what my stealth venture, Radar Networks, is working on. Lately I’ve been seeing growing buzz in the industry around the "semantics" meme — for example at the recent DEMO conference, several companies used the word "semantics" in their pitches. And of course there have been some fundings [...]

Here is my timeline of the past, present and future of the Web. Feel free to put this meme on your own site, but please link back to the master image at this site (the URL that the thumbnail below points to) because I’ll be updating the image from time to time.

This slide illustrates my [...]

NOTES

Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93
Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST
License — This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed. If you would like to distribute a version of thisarticle, please link back [...]

The next SFWIN (San Francisco Web Innovators) monthly networking event is happening this Thursday at 6PM in downtown San Francisco at the offices of Orrick, a law firm with a very nice event space overlooking the skyline. We usually have around 100 people or so and delicious food and an open bar. You can get [...]

Hi everyone, I am trying to generate some specific stats about the size of the Blogosphere. I couldn’t find the answer in Dave Sifry’s excellent State of the Blogosphere reports. Do any of you know of any studies or reports that answer the following:

Average number of post per blog
Average size per blog
post
Average number [...]

Today our product team met with Shel Isreal to show him the alpha version of what we are building here at Radar Networks and get his feedback. Shel had a lot of good insights. We showed him our full product and explained the vision, and gave him a tour of the new dimension of the [...]

My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web. We are looking for a few experienced search engineers to join [...]

This study is interesting — it seems to miss the point that many blogs are loaded with content that is actually USEFUL for work — for example in-house blogs, blogs from competitors, blogs from industry pundits, blogs from software developers, blogs from users and customers … and the list goes on. Simply reading blogs cannot [...]

Fred Wilson has an intersting post about how to keep founders engaged in the companies they started after they step out of CEO roles. He says:
I’d like to find a formula (like the one Yahoo! has found) and bottle it. 
Because I believe companies that can keep their founders engaged and motivated
are so much better off [...]

This is cool Click to see why.  I think this idea has great value for viral, meme-based Web advertising. Just imagine: Advertisers could release really cool animations to add to sites, and site owners could add them into their sites for entertainment or humor. The animations could run ads within them as well. It’s fun. [...]

Great news! Radar Networks, the venture I’ve been building, has received its first round of outside funding from Vulcan Capital. We are heavily in stealth mode.

Tristan, has written an important article on the emerging RSS standards war, in which he suggests some solutions to the divergent format specs that are popping up right now.

Marc has developed an interesting new service that provides a universal "one-stop shop" for posting microcontent to various blogs. It’s a sort of universal "blog this" button that anyone can use. Nice idea. Marc explains it better than I can, so here it is in his own words.

This article provides some very compelling and useful statistics about the growth of the Weblog tools market.

First of all I know Clay Shirky, and he’s a good fellow. But he’s simply wrong about his claim that "tagging" (of the flavor that is appearing on del.icio.us — what I call "social tagging") is inherently better than the use of formal ontologies. Clay favors the tagging approach because it is bottom-up and emergent [...]

Rohit Gupta, a Bombay-based writer, who also reads this blog, is writing a blog-novel. He has come up with an innovative way to promote it — by letting readers choose quotes from his text to “own” — by choosing a quote and linking to his blog-novel from it, he will in return link back to [...]

Greg Tyrell, a PhD student with a strong interest in bioinformatics, has put together a detailed analysis and report on the GoMeme 1.0 experiment, containing several visualizations and results of the survey. Nice work Greg!

Also in other news, Google has started indexing the results. Currently there are 733 results when searching for sites with original, [...]

This article provides a good overview of the Weblog tools market, products, and market share.

Note: This experiment is now finished.

GoMeme 2.0 — Copy This GoMeme From This Line to The End of this article, and paste into your blog. Then follow the instructions below to fill it out for your site.
Steal This Post!!!! This is a GoMeme– a new way to spread an idea along social networks. This is [...]

I wonder if anyone from MoveOn.Org or the Republicans will notice our GoMeme experiments? (Not that I’m taking sides — I’ll simply be happy if somebody wins the election!) Grassroots political campaigns could potentially really benefit from the techniques we’re testing here. For example, imagine a “blog meme” for a political campaign — a meme [...]

This posting is the FAQ and introduction for a new, improved, second-generation meme experiment that is designed to spread faster and more broadly than the first meme experiment. We call this kind of meme a “GoMeme” (pronounced Go-Meem), because it is a meme that is designed to Go. The actual GoMeme, which you can [...]

Here’s an idea I’ve had recently that is related to the Meme Propagation experiment (see posts below on this blog for more about that ongoing experiment). The concept is for a new, meme-based, way to syndicate content across blogs. Here’s how it might work:
1. You join a “meme syndication network” by joining at a central [...]

Meme Update: The Meme is already global and the rate of growth is showing signs of exponential increase. It’s made the Daypop top list, also same with Blogdex. It’s made its way onto several early-adopter sites and lists. Already the results are interesting. One thing that is clear is that there is quite a lag [...]

NOTE: This experiment is now finished.

This is an experiment in spreading ideas across weblogs using the principles of viral marketing and social networks using a new method for making content more viral, which we call a "GoMeme."