Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

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.

This is an older version of this article. The most recent version is located here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_desktop.php
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I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I’ve [...]

There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence over the years. And recently it seems there has been a resurgence in interest in this topic in the media. But artificial intelligence scares me. And frankly, I don’t need it. My human intelligence is quite good, thank you very much. And as far as [...]

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 [...]

The New Scientist just posted a quick video preview of Twine to YouTube. It only shows a tiny bit of the functionality, but it’s a sneak peak.
We’ve been letting early beta testers into Twine and we’re learning a lot from all the great feedback, and also starting to see some cool new uses of [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In recent months we have witnessed a number of social networking sites begin to open up their platforms to outside developers. While this trend has been exhibited most prominently by Facebook, it is being embraced by all the leading social networking services, such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Myspace and others. Along separate dimensions we also see [...]

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 MIT Technology Review just published a large article on the Semantic Web and Web 3.0, in which Radar Networks, Metaweb, Joost, RealTravel and other ventures are profiled.

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 [...]

Here at Radar Networks we are working on practical ways to bring the Semantic Web to end-users. One of the interesting themes that has come up a lot, both internally, as well as in discussions with VC’s, is the coming plateau in the productivity of keyword search. As the Web gets increasingly large and complex, keyword [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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.