Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

A group of computer scientists have come up with a mathematical technique to detect surprising features in dense information streams. They tested their method by comparing it to what human’s considered surprising, and the results were… surprisingly good! A mathematical model of surprise could be very useful in next-generation information systems, user-interfaces, situation rooms, and [...]

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 [...]

There is a hidden problem with open databases such as Google Base and Ning — as presently designed — a problem that I have not seen any discussion of yet. Briefly stated: As the number of unique data schemas created in such systems grows, the probability of applications that use those schemas breaking also grows [...]

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.

Check out http://www.facster.com/ — it’s a site that provides some cool features on top of the US Statistical Abstracts and State Abstracts data-sets. This site seems to be just the kind of "statistics portal" I daydreamed about a while back. Very useful idea.

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 [...]

After 30 years of research, a very interesting new theory of cognition has been announced. The theory posits that all human cognition and behavior is based on just one simple, non-algorithmic procedure that has been named confabulation. If the theory is correct it could offer a radical new approach to artificial intelligence, knowledge discovery, and [...]

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 [...]

Google has a very nice iterative suggestion feature in beta — http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en It’s quite fast! Very nice. Kudos to the Google team!

Media Mammon  is a new stock market for memes. You can invest play money in words and phrases that are spreading through the media. May the best meme win! See also: A Physics of Ideas.

Here are some more features that I wish the iPod offered: Side-Trips From Current Playlist When I’m playing through one of my playlists and I get to a song I really like, I wish I had the ability to take sidetrips to other related subjects, accessible from the trackwheel or menu button: After this song, [...]

This interesting new brain study reveals processing differences between Semantic Memory and Episodic Memory in human brains. Nature performs these functions differently, and there is probably a good reason why that is so. On the Web we don’t really have an equivalent of Episodic Memory or Semantic Memory yet… but we’re working on it!

This is quite interesting. It turns out that manufacturers of color laser printers are secretly encoding tracking numbers onto every inch of every printout. These microscopic codes enable printouts to be traced back to particular printers that printed them, and thus to whomever owns those devices. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of this.

Researchers at Cornell have come up with a clever new way to determine the sentiment expressed in textual data. Their method relies of separating objective statements from subjective statements, and then just measuring the subjective ones. This results in more accurate measures of sentiment.

This article proposes a design pattern for ontologies and the Semantic Web based on the concept of formally defined Roles as a means to richly express the semantics of relationships among entities in ontologies. Roles are special types of n-ary relations, and thus the use of Roles is a subset of the Semantic Web best-practices [...]

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:

Ben Hammersly has come out with a video of his talk explaining the Semantic Web for beginners. It’s a great resource to explain what the Semantic Web is all about for people who are new to the subject or simply interested in the underlying technology of RDF, the concept of triples, etc. It is also [...]

Change This, a project that helps to promote interesting new ideas so that they get noticed above the noise level of our culture has published my article on “A Physics of Ideas” as one of their featured Manifestos. They use an innovative PDF layout for easier reading, and they also provide a means for readers [...]

My friend Maribeth Back builds reading machines — devices that provide new ways to read and experience written text. It’s part art, part technology. For example, she has one reading machine that lets you drive through texts, changing direction as you go — but only seeing one line at a time — at super high-speed. [...]

Spam is now 60% of Emails, according to recent measures. Bulk unsolicited emails account for over 60 per cent of all email traffic on the internet, according to the Office of Fair Trading. That is up from under half in 2003 and under 10 per cent in 2001. Kinda makes me wonder if we should [...]

Researchers from U. Chicago and Microsoft Asia have developed a new Web indexing algorithm called BlockRank that ranks pages according to which sections (“blocks”) of content on other pages contain links to them. The results are said to be similar to Google’s PageRank algorithm.

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.

If you’ve ever tried writing a business plan, you know what a chore it is to locate statistics about industries, markets and products. While there are many market research firms that charge huge sums for their reports on particular segments, one quickly realizes that the wide degree of variance in their statistics means that just [...]

Note: This experiment is now finished. GoMeme 2.0 — Copy This GoMeme From This Line to The End of this article, and paste into your blog. Then follow the instructions below to fill it out for your site. Steal This Post!!!! This is a GoMeme– a new way to spread an idea along social networks. [...]

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.