Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
I’m soon headed to Amsterdam to keynote the SIBOS conference. SIBOS is the largest annual banking conference in the world, attracting around 10,000 attendees. But what’s most interesting about this event is the innovation stream within the conference. It’s called the Innotribe and is focused on exploring and innovating the future of financial services. This [...]
Kate Ray has done a terrific job illustrating and explaining Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web in her new documentary. She interviews, Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, me, and many others. If you’re interested in where the Web is headed, and the challenges and opportunities ahead, then you should watch this, and share it too!
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Today I am announcing that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of a long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web. [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
I have noticed an interesting and important trend of late. The Web is starting to spread outside of what we think of as “the Web” and into “the World.” This trend is exemplified by many data points. For example: The Web on mobile devices like the iPhone. Finally it’s really usable on a phone. Now [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Notes: – This article last updated on March 11, 2009. – For follow-up, connect with me about this on Twitter here. – See also: for more details, be sure to read the new review by Doug Lenat, creator of Cyc. He just saw the Wolfram Alpha demo and has added many useful insights. ——————————————————————– Introducing [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]