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...
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 [...]
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 [...]
Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about: Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more [...]
Nice article in Scientific American about Gordon Bell’s work at Microsoft Research on the MyLifeBits project. MyLifeBits provides one perspective on the not-too-far-off future in which all our information, and even some of our memories and experiences, are recorded and made available to us (and possibly to others) for posterity. This is a good application [...]
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 [...]
Check out this very impressive user-interface prototype for a desktop that works more like a real desk — a messy desk in fact. Very delightful design work that makes want to use it now! Related Posts:Fast Company Interview — "Connective Intelligence"Radar Networks Announces Twine.comListen to this Discussion on the Future of the WebMy "A Physics [...]
I’ve read several blog posts reacting to John Markoff’s article today. There seem to be some misconceptions in those posts about what the Semantic Web is and is not. Here I will try to succinctly correct a few of the larger misconceptions I’ve run into: The Semantic Web is not just a single Web. There [...]
A New York Times article came out today about the Semantic Web — in which I was quoted, speaking about my company Radar Networks. Here’s an excerpt: Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But [...]
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 to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net from yourversion, thanks. Printable version — Click here to download [...]
All living things are made up of proteins. Each protein is a string of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids, and each protein can consist of dozens to thousands of them. Scientists write down these amino acid sequences as series of text letters. Clark and her colleagues assign musical notes to the different [...]
This online video preview of the upcoming Web-based organizer, Scrybe. The app has an unusually elegant and innovative AJAX interface. It’s beautifully designed. Watch the video. Related Posts:Interest Networks are at a Tipping PointWeb 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others…Video: My Talk on The Future of Libraries — "Library 3.0"My Visit to DERI [...]
This is a surprisingly good article on the nature of consciousness — providing a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cognitive science research. It covers the question from a number of perspectives and interviews many of the leading current researchers. Related Posts:Big Thinkers' Most Dangerous IdeasSimulated Universes and the Nature of ConsciousnessThe Metaweb: The Global [...]
This is an extremely cool video of a beautifully designed interface that connects physical objects and digital objects in a new way. You can drag things off of your computer, right onto your table, and then from there connect them to physical objects, like a book, which can then be moved around causing the digital [...]
The co-founder of the Wikipedia has decided to fork the project, creating a new alternative compendium called the Citizendium. The idea is that it will be comprised of community content that is moderated by "expert" editors. There seems to be some consternation about this among Wikipedians, while others think it may produce much more reliable [...]
The OWL language, and tools such as Protege and TopBraid Composer make it easy to design ontologies. But what about the problem of integrating disparate ontologies? I haven’t really found a good solution for this yet. In my own experience designing a number of OWL ontologies (500 classes – 3000 classes on average) it has [...]
My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web. We are looking for a few experienced search engineers to join [...]
Well if you are into libraries I guess these photos are sexy. Personally I’ve always loved libraries and used to spend hours just exploring in my college library. The Web is similarly fascinating to wander in, but there’s still something special about physical, tangible books that’s missing from the digital revolution. Is it just me [...]
I haven’t blogged very much about my stealth startup, Radar Networks, yet. At the most, I’ve made a few cryptic posts and announcements in the past, but we’ve been keeping things pretty quiet. That’s been a conscious decision because we have been working intensively on R&D and we just weren’t ready to say much yet. [...]
The recent negative hype about the lack of privacy in search results got me thinking about the needs of online services versus those of individuals. Is there a way to satisfy both constraints? AOL’s accidental data release was one thing that worried me. Google’s "personal search" feature, where the log of all your searches is [...]
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. Related Posts:Radar Networks Announces Twine.comBeautiful Idea: How to Program the Global MindMy "A Physics of Ideas" [...]
A new mathematical technique provides a dramatically better way to analyze data, such as audio data, radar, sonar, or any other form of time-frequency data. Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes, 10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated to sound. Yet despite this miniscule number, the auditory [...]
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 [...]
Yesterday, the first public open-source release of Open IRIS was annnounced. IRIS is a Java-based desktop semantic personal information manager developed by SRI (with help from my own company, Radar Networks — we provided a some of our early semantic object libraries and a native triplestore, and some work on UI; note that our own [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I recently read a report of new neuroscience research in which researchers are able to predict what a person will recall by analyzing their brainstate. You can read a summary here. This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for using biofeedback to guide brainstates, in order to improve memory. Here’s a [...]