define('FS_METHOD','direct');define('FS_CHMOD_DIR',0775 & ~umask());define('FS_CHMOD_FILE',0664 & ~umask()); Web/Tech « Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Archive for the ‘Web/Tech’ Category

Life in Perpetual Beta: The Film

June 11th, 2008

Melissa Pierce is a filmmaker who is making a film about "Life in Perpetual Beta." It’s about how people who are adapting and reinventing themselves in the moment, and a new philosophy or approach to life. She’s interviewed a number of interesting people, and while I was in Chicago recently, she spoke with me as [...]

Video of my Presentation at The Next Web 2008 Conference

June 3rd, 2008

Here is the full video of my talk on the Semantic Web at The Next Web 2008 Conference. Thanks to Boris and the NextWeb gang!
Related Posts:The Next Generation of Web Search — Search 3.0Interest Networks are at a Tipping PointA Few Predictions for the Near FutureTwine's Explosive GrowthMy Visit to DERI — World's Premier Semantic [...]

Tagging and the Semantic Web: Tags as Objects

May 22nd, 2008

John Mills, one of the engineers behind Twine, recently wrote up an interesting article discussing our approach to semantic tags. It’s a good read for folks who think about the Semantic Web and tags.
Related Posts:The Next Generation of Web Search — Search 3.0Twine's Explosive GrowthFast Company Interview — "Connective Intelligence"Interest Networks are at a [...]

Associative Search and the Semantic Web: The Next Step Beyond Natural Language Search

May 13th, 2008

Our present day search engines are a poor match for the way that our brains actually think and search for answers. Our brains search associatively along networks of relationships. We search for things that are related to things we know, and things that are related to those things. Our brains not only search along these [...]

Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote

April 23rd, 2008

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who’s Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about “Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web.”
Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you [...]

My Visit to DERI — World's Premier Semantic Web Research Institute

March 26th, 2008

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to visit, and speak at, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), located in Galway, Ireland. My hosts were Stefan Decker, the director of the lab, and John Breslin who is heading the SIOC project.
DERI has become the world’s premier research institute for the Semantic Web. Everyone working in [...]

First Week of Twine Beta Phase II Report

March 14th, 2008

This week we began letting the second wave of beta users into the Twine invite-only beta. It’s been a very busy and exciting time for the Twine team. I’ll be providing more detailed stats on an ongoing basis in a few weeks once we have more data to analyze. For now, I will just provide [...]

Do You Want Early Access to the Twine Beta?

March 8th, 2008

Special offer to readers of my blog…
There are now well over 30,000 users in the queue to get into the Twine beta. We’re going to start letting people in from the waiting list in waves and it should take about a month or two to let everyone in.
But what good is a waiting list if [...]

How about Web 3G?

March 3rd, 2008

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 Commentary: Radar Networks Raises $13M for Twine

February 25th, 2008

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 [...]

Video of My Semantic Web Talk

February 12th, 2008

This is a video of me giving commentary on my "Understanding the Semantic Web" talk and how it relates to Twine, to a group of French business school students who made a visit to our office last month.

Here is the link to the video, if the embedded version below does not play.
Nova Spivack – Semantic [...]

Fun With CoolWhip: The Twine Crunchies Video

January 19th, 2008

The Crunchies are done. At Radar Networks we are really honored to have our product, Twine.com, nominated as a finalist for Best Technology Innovation of 2007. It was very cool to see our Twine logo up there on stage next to Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and so many other incredible companies — especially considering we were [...]

A Nice Video Intro to The Semantic Web for Non-Geeks

January 14th, 2008

Question: What do you do if you’re not a computer scientist but you are interested in understanding what all this Semantic Web stuff is about?
Answer: Watch this video!

Related Posts:A Few Predictions for the Near FuturePowerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and TwineQuick Video Preview of TwineTrue Knowledge is CoolThe Next Generation of Web [...]

First Full Online Demo of Twine

December 13th, 2007

Scoble came over and filmed a full conversation and video demo of Twine. You can watch the long version (1 hour) or the short version (10 mins) on his site. Here’s the link.
Related Posts:Fast Company Interview — "Connective Intelligence"Interest Networks are at a Tipping PointPowerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and TwineQuick Video [...]

Defining the Semantic Graph — What is it Really?

November 23rd, 2007

This is written in response to a post by Anne Zelenka.
I’ve been talking about the coming “semantic graph” for quite some time now, and it seems the meme has suddenly caught on thanks to a recent article by Tim Berners-Lee in which he speaks of an emerging “Giant Global Graph” or “GGG.” But if the [...]

Favorite Site of the Week: Slideshare.net

November 23rd, 2007

Slideshare is a site where people post and share their Powerpoints. You can watch the powerpoints quickly with a little viewer widget that let’s you click through them in your browser. There are some really interesting, creative, and informative presentations there. It’s addictive, I’ve been looking at presentations all morning. Can’t stop. (Thanks to Peter [...]

Powerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and Twine

November 21st, 2007

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 [...]

True Knowledge is Cool

November 7th, 2007

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 Twine [...]

A Video and an Audio Cast About Twine

October 25th, 2007

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!

October 20th, 2007

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 so [...]

Radar Networks Announces Twine.com

October 18th, 2007

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 [...]

Radar Networks Coming Out of Stealth – Friday, October 19

October 15th, 2007

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 2.0, [...]

Web 3.0 — The Best Official Definition Imaginable

October 4th, 2007

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 [...]

My Burma Meme Spreads to 17,000 Web Pages in just one week!

October 3rd, 2007

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 [...]

Gartner is Wrong about Web 3.0

September 24th, 2007

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 marketing [...]

Cool Women in Tech

September 20th, 2007

Hey, I’m posting this to support my friend Kaliya’s  (un)conference for women in  tech called She’s Geeky, A Women’s Tech (un)conference (October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA).
Here at  Radar Networks we’re proud that we have a bunch of really smart women across all areas of the company including Sonja Erickson our awesome VP of systems, [...]

The Semantic Web, Collective Intelligence and Hyperdata

September 18th, 2007

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 [...]

Open Source Projects for Extracting Data and Metadata from Files & the Web

September 11th, 2007

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 Astoria Not Supporting RDF

September 11th, 2007

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 consumed by [...]

Knowledge Networking

August 18th, 2007

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 collective [...]