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...
Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization [...]
A new project applies text-mining to help scientists in the UK discover knowledge in large collections of research articles and data (Found in: KurzweilAI): Julie NightingaleTuesday January 10, 2006The Guardian Scientific research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome Project alone is generating enough documentation to "sink battleships". So it’s not [...]
Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS — an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my [...]
I am playing around with the barely functional live beta of Google Base that just launched. There’s not much there, but what I do see is interesting. At the very least this is going to be serious competition for Ning. Beyond that it may compete with Craigslist and other classifieds and events listing services. It’s [...]
Here is a good article from IBM that provides decent, not-overly-technical, overview of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web, and the value they offer. Related Posts:Radar Networks Profiled in Technology ReviewWeb 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…How the WebOS Evolves?Folktologies — Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology DistinctionNew Version of My "Metaweb" [...]
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. Related Posts:Radar Networks Announces Twine.comFolktologies — Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology DistinctionPowerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and TwineWeb 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…What [...]
I just read this really cool idea about how to design a programming language for the global brain — think of it as grid computing, but where some of the agents in the grid are humans and others are computers, working together to solve problems. I’ve had similar ideas to this over the years, for [...]
I’ve been thinking about different types of communities recently. Two forms of community that are often discussed are "communities of interest" where the members share a common set of interests (e.g. a community of people interested in Japanese culture), and "communities of practice" where the members share a common set of skills (e.g. a community [...]
Microsoft announced that they are buying Groove Networks today, in a deal that has gotten some buzz. But I don’t really think it’s very significant given that Microsoft already had a large equity stake in Groove and has linked them into their apps for more than a year now. I’ve always been puzzled by the [...]
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 [...]
The Ontology Problem is a fundamental challenge of the emerging Semantic Web. This problem is comprised of three key sub-problems, the Upper Ontology Problem, the Domain Ontology Problem, and the Ontology Integration Problem, described in detail below: Related Posts:Radar Networks Announces Twine.comA Bunch of New Press About Radar NetworksWeb 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb [...]
So, rumor has it that Google is working on a browser and/or other software to challenge Microsoft. And, what’s more, this may be based on Mozilla…. interesting…. If true, the folks at Google should get in touch with me… without disclosing too much (yet), we are working on a project (with SRI, for DARPA) to [...]
This is an idea for a new way to navigate interactively through large audio sets, such as collections of thousands of music tracks, and to automatically or interactively learn and evolve interesting trajectories through such spaces. Related Posts:Powerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and TwineRadar Networks Announces Twine.comListen to this Discussion on the [...]
This article provides a good overview of the Weblog tools market, products, and market share. Related Posts:GoMeme 2.0 – Help Test This MemeNew Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the NetThe Metaweb is Coming… See this Diagram…The Pattern of Social Technology EvolutionSemantic Web Officially Approved by W3C
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 add [...]
Matt Poepping has come up with an interesting idea for how to create a fully distributed searchable database on the Net. It’s a cool enough idea and approach that people should see his RFC and comment on it. He may be onto something important here. Related Posts:New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future [...]
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 [...]
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." Related Posts:New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the NetFAQ for GoMeme 2.0The Metaweb [...]
Check out Facetop, a really smart way to do collaboration and videoconferencing at the same time. See the picture in the link above. (from Josh Related Posts:Extremely Cool — Sony Invention Links Digital and Physical WorldIdea: Driving Through Virtual SoundscapesVideo: My Talk on The Future of Libraries — "Library 3.0"Twine's Explosive GrowthInterest Networks are at [...]
Notes: Many people have requested this graph and so I am posting my latest version of it. The Metaweb is the coming “intelligent Web” that is evolving from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. The Metaweb is starting to emerge as we shift from a Web focused on information to [...]
One of the big changes that will be enabled by the coming Metaweb is the shift from application-centric computing to data-centric computing. As the Metaweb evolves, information will be imbued with increasingly sophisticated metadata. HTML provides metadata about formatting and links. XML provides metadata about structure and behavior. RDF, RDFS and OWL provide metadata about [...]
AOL is entering the social networking fray by converting ICQ to a social networking tool. As I previously predicted social networking and IM are converging and this will give competitive advantages to companies with established IM user-bases. Here is the article. Related Posts:Video: My Talk on The Future of Libraries — "Library 3.0"Congratulations to Adam [...]
This diagram (click to see larger version) illustrates why I believe technology evolution is moving towards what I call the Metaweb. The Metaweb is emerging from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web. Related Posts:New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the NetMy "A Physics of Ideas" Manifesto [...]
The Internet and American Life Project found that between 2 and 7 percent of Americans have weblogs, and about 10 percent of them update their blogs regularly. 11 Percent of surfers reported visiting blogs. The study was a random telephone survey of 1,555 Internet users with a 3 percent margin of error. Related Posts:GoMeme 2.0 [...]
Here is my strategic outlook on the evolution of online technologies: past, present and future. Please see the table below. Commentary follows the table… Content Communication Collaboration Community Commerce 1980’s The Net Desktop Publishing Phone, Fax, Email Database Applications BBS’s & On-line Services Phone, Fax, Early EDI 1990’s The Web [...]
Before you invest time, content, relationships or money in any desktop social software play, be forewarned, this idea is already “old hat” and there already several apps out there that combine social networking, chat, and community features. Note that here I am placing emphasis on “desktop” — my point is not to malign social networking [...]
Huge news for the Semantic Web — the W3C has officially approved the RDF and OWL specs. Related Posts:New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the NetThe Metaweb is Coming… See this Diagram…Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…How the WebOS Evolves?Folktologies — Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology Distinction
Ran across this paper on some ideas for distributed, peer-to-peer social software. It’s a very nice overview of some of the main ideas and benefits of a decentralized model for social networking, and also touches on Semantic Web topics. Interestingly the author has hit upon many of the major themes in Radar Networks’ platform — [...]
At Sandia National Laboratories researchers are working on a new technology that helps managers read the minds of their employees. This is supposed to help the managers assign tasks more effectively, gain insight into their employees’ states of mind, and achieve higher human performance. Technologies of this nature are useful for creating what I call [...]