Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

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 [...]

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 [...]

In this interview with Fast Company, I discuss my concept of "connective intelligence." Intelligence is really in the connections between things, not the things themselves. Twine facilitates smarter connections between content, and between people. This facilitates the emergence of higher levels of collective intelligence.

I’ve posted a link to a video of my best talk — given at the GRID ‘08 Conference in Stockholm this summer. It’s about the growth of collective intelligence and the Semantic Web, and the future and role the media. Read more and get the video here. Enjoy!

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Business 2.0 Article on Radar Networks and the Semantic Web just came online. It’s a huge article. In many ways it’s one of the best popular articles written about the Semantic Web in the mainstream press. It also goes into a lot of detail about what Radar Networks is working on.
One point of clarification, [...]

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 [...]

If you are interested in the future of the Web, you might enjoy listening to this interview with me, moderated by Dr. Paul Miller of Talis. We discuss, in-depth: the Semantic Web, Web 3.0, SPARQL, collective intelligence, knowledge management, the future of search, triplestores, and Radar Networks.

This is just a brief post because I am actually slammed with VC meetings right now. But I wanted to congratulate our friends at Metaweb for their pre-launch announcement. My company, Radar Networks, is the only other major venture-funded play working on the Semantic Web for consumers so we are thrilled to see more action [...]

Is it only Wednesday? It feels like a whole week already! I’ve been in back-to-back VC meetings, board discussions and strategy meetings since last week. I think this must be related to the heating-up of the "Web 3.0" meme and the semantic sector in general. Perhaps it is also due to the coverage we got [...]

I’ve been thinking since 1994 about how to get past a fundamental barrier to human social progress, which I call “The Collective IQ Barrier.” Most recently I have been approaching this challenge in the products we are developing at my stealth venture, Radar Networks.
In a nutshell, here is how I define this barrier:
The Collective IQ [...]

I’ve been reading some of the further posts on various blogs in reaction to the Markoff article in the New York Times last Sunday. There is a tremendous amount of misconception about the Semantic Web– as evidenced for example by Ross Mayfield’s post recently. Ross implied that the Semantic Web is about automating the Web, [...]

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 [...]

I was reading this article in Wired magazine about wikis, where the article itself is a wiki that the readers can contribute to — and an idea occurred to me. What if you could make an entire magazine that was in a fact a wiki? This magazine would be published online via a Website running [...]

Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel’s perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It’s still a [...]

Check out this video demo of Microsoft Photosynth — an experimental technology that combines multiple photos of the same thing into a 3-D model that can then be navigated and explored — it’s beautiful, visionary and well… just awesome.

Grupthink is a service where anyone can create and participate in polls on various subjects. It’s similar to an idea I once had about polling the global mind in real-time (although their system does not show votes happening in real-time, presently). It reminds me of several other Web 2.0 sites, but it’s nicely done. Worth [...]

Check out The Broth — it’s a "global mosaic" in which you can move tiles around in real time with other people to create emergent artworks. It’s really cool to watch images grow and morph from the combined imagination of people around the Net. Beautiful.

My father, Mayer Spivack, has written an interesting piece on managing thinking styles in organizations. He points out the difference between the thinking styles in early and later stage companies, and the challenge of managing and integrating these two aspects of the organization’s cognitive process. I think that the syncretic-associative mode (curious, inventive, exploratory, enthusiastic, [...]

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 [...]

Introduction:
This article proposes the creation of a new open, nonprofit service on the Web that will provide something akin to “collective self-awareness” back to the Web. This service is like a “Google Zeitgeist” on steroids, but with a lot more real-time, interactive, participatory data, technology and features init. The goal is to measure and visualize [...]

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 surprising that academics seeking data [...]

Amazon has launched a new service that seeks to create a marketplace for human intelligence on the Net. The idea is to utilize humans like one might utilize intelligent agents, to help complete tasks that humans do better than computers — for example like image adjustments, formatting, tagging and marking up content, adding metatdata to [...]

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.

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 [...]

This article provides an overview of the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton, which has found that the behavior of a network of specially shielded random number generators deviates from stasticial randomness prior to major world events. I have been following this project for several years and have made various suggestions for further experiments to test [...]