Nova Spivack - Minding the Planet » Microcontent

Interest Networks are at a Tipping Point

Nova — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:01:45 +0000

UPDATE: There’s already a lot of good discussion going on around this post in my public twine.

I’ve been writing about a new trend that I call “interest networking” for a while now. But I wanted to take the opportunity before the public launch of Twine on Tuesday (tomorrow) to reflect on the state of this new category of applications, which I think is quickly reaching its tipping point. The concept is starting to catch on as people reach for more depth around their online interactions.

In fact – that’s the ultimate value proposition of interest networks – they move us beyond the super poke and towards something more meaningful. In the long-term view, interest networks are about building a global knowledge commons. But in the short term, the difference between social networks and interest networks is a lot like the difference between fast food and a home-cooked meal – interest networks are all about substance.

At a time when social media fatigue is setting in, the news cycle is growing shorter and shorter, and the world is delivered to us in soundbytes and catchphrases, we crave substance. We go to great lengths in pursuit of substance. Interest networks solve this problem – they deliver substance.t

So, what is an interest network?

In short, if a social network is about who you are interested in, an interest network is about what you are interested in. It’s the logical next step.

Twine for example, is an interest network that helps you share information with friends, family, colleagues and groups, based on mutual interests. Individual “twines” are created for content around specific subjects. This content might include bookmarks, videos, photos, articles, e-mails, notes or even documents. Twines may be public or private and can serve individuals, small groups or even very large groups of members.

I have also written quite a bit about the Semantic Web and the Semantic Graph, and Tim Berners-Lee has recently started talking about what he calls the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Tim and I are in agreement that social networks merely articulate the relationships between people. Social networks do not surface the equally, if not more important, relationships between people and places, places and organizations, places and other places, organization and other organizations, organization and events, documents and documents, and so on.

This is where interest networks come in. It’s still early days to be clear, but interest networks are operating on the premise of tapping into a multi–dimensional graph that manifests the complexity and substance of our world, and delivers the best of that world to you, every day.

We’re seeing more and more companies think about how to capitalize on this trend. There are suddenly (it seems, but this category has been building for many months) lots of different services that can be viewed as interest networks in one way or another, and here are some examples:

What all of these interest networks have in common is some sort of a bottom-up, user-driven crawl of the Web, which is the way that I’ve described Twine when we get the question about how we propose to index the entire Web (the answer: we don’t.

We let our users tell us what they’re most interested in, and we follow their lead).

Most interest networks exhibit the following characteristics as well:

They have some sort of bookmarking/submission/markup function to store and map data (often using existing metaphors, even if what’s under the hood is new)
They also have some sort of social sharing function to provide the network benefit (this isn’t exclusive to interest networks, obviously, but it is characteristic)
And in most cases, interest networks look to add some sort of “smarts” or “recommendations” capability to the mix (that is, you get more out than you put in)

This last bullet point is where I see next-generation interest networks really providing the most benefit over social bookmarking tools, wikis, collaboration suites and pure social networks of one kind or another.

To that end, we think that Twine is the first of a new breed of intelligent applications that really get to know you better and better over time – and that the more you use Twine, the more useful it will become. Adding your content to Twine is an investment in the future of your data, and in the future of your interests.

At first Twine begins to enrich your data with semantic tags and links to related content via our recommendations engine that learns over time. Twine also crawls any links it sees in your content and gathers related content for you automatically – adding it to your personal or group search engine for you, and further fleshing out the semantic graph of your interests which in turn results in even more relevant recommendations.

The point here is that adding content to Twine, or other next-generation interest networks, should result in increasing returns. That’s a key characteristic, in fact, of the interest networks of the future – the idea that the ratio of work (input) to utility (output) has no established ceiling.

Another key characteristic of interest networks may be in how they monetize. Instead of being advertising-driven, I think they will focus more on a marketing paradigm. They will be to marketing what search engines were to advertising. For example, Twine will be monetizing our rich model of individual and group interests, using our recommendation engine. When we roll this capability out in 2009, we will deliver extremely relevant, useful content, products and offers directly to users who have demonstrated they are really interested in such information, according to their established and ongoing preferences.

6 months ago, you could not really prove that “interest networking” was a trend, and certainly it wasn’t a clearly defined space. It was just an idea, and a goal. But like I said, I think that we’re at a tipping point, where the technology is getting to a point at which we can deliver greater substance to the user, and where the culture is starting to crave exactly this kind of service as a way of making the Web meaningful again.

I think that interest networks are a huge market opportunity for many startups thinking about what the future of the Web will be like, and I think that we’ll start to see the term used more and more widely. We may even start to see some attention from analysts — Carla, Jeremiah, and others, are you listening?

Now, I obviously think that Twine is THE interest network of choice. After all we helped to define the category, and we’re using the Semantic Web to do it. There’s a lot of potential in our engine and our application, and the growing community of passionate users we’ve attracted.

Our 1.0 release really focuses on UE/usability, which was a huge goal for us based on user feedback from our private beta, which began in March of this year. I’ll do another post soon talking about what’s new in Twine. But our TOS (time on site) at 6 minutes/user (all time) and 12 minutes/user (over the last month) is something that the team here is most proud of – it tells us that Twine is sticky, and that “the dogs are eating the dog food.”

Now that anyone can join, it will be fun and gratifying to watch Twine grow.

Still, there is a lot more to come, and in 2009 our focus is going to shift back to extending our Semantic Web platform and turning on more of the next-generation intelligence that we’ve been building along the way. We’re going to take interest networking to a whole new level.

Stay tuned!

Burma Update: Protestors Cremated Alive; Monks Massacred in Jungle

Nova — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:33:28 +0000

The situation in Burma is far worse than the mainstream media has reported so far. Watch this video that was just smuggled out showing soldiers beating unarmed protesters. There are now reports coming in from eyewitnesses of young school students being shot by the army, masses of injured protestors being cremated alive, and thousands of monks and other protesters being killed and dumped in mass graves in the jungles. The junta has now imprisoned thousands of monks and plans to "send them away." The Burmese military junta is known for torture, summary executions, and is listed with Somalia as one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. This is essentially a form of genocide or state-sponsored terrorism — in this case by a regime against its own people. Help get the word out. Sign this petition. This has to be stopped. The Burmese people are helpless and need protection from the world community.

Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

Nova — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:56:18 +0000

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 and more online—and in the
process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or
not.

(snip…)

In the coming years, our ability to interact with the information
we’re so rapidly generating will determine how successfully we can
manage our digital lives. There is a great challenge at our doorsteps—a
shift in the way we live with each other.

As designers of user experiences for digital products
and services, we can make people’s digital lives more meaningful and
less confusing. It is our responsibility to envision not only
techniques for sorting, ordering, and navigating these digital
information spaces, but also to devise methods of helping people feel
comfortable with such interactions. To better understand and ultimately
solve this information management problem, we should take a holistic
view of the digital person. While our data might be scattered, people
need to feel whole.

'Bemes' are Defining the Blogosphere

Nova — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:29:57 +0000

Tom Hayes has an interesting post in which he coins the word ‘beme" to mean a meme that spreads in the blogosphere.

Michael Malone’s ABC News column on Thursday mentioning "bemes" has certainly produced a lot of interest. Originally, I coined the word beme
to describe a meme propagated by blogs and bloggers. Now I can see
that the turn of phrase has a much bigger potential to capture the
rapidly-moving cultural touchstones of the Bubble Generation.

As you may know, "meme" was first defined by Richard Dawkins in 1976
as "a unit of cultural information" spread from one mind to another.
In other words, a viral idea that eventually becomes common knowledge.

Fast forward three decades, and it seems to me that technology has turbo-charged the meme process. Looking for the juste mot
to describe a "purposeful" meme fed into the vast human network of the
Internet, either by blog, email, video, phonecast, social media or
other viral means, beme seems to fit the bill.

A beme is a turbo-charged meme made possible entirely by the
existence of the network affect. A beme can be impactful because it is
lurid–a photo of a panty-less Britney Spears, or humorous–a
whimisical video of the band OKGO on treadmills, or gut-wrenching–the
sad tirade by comedian Michael Richards. A beme can cement an idea
with the public in a way that cannot be legislated or regulated. No
legal effort by Cisco to enforce a trademark, for example, will make
the public unlearn that Apple produces the iPhone.

A meme is old media, a beme is new media.

A meme takes off by accident, a beme by design.

A meme can take years to surface, a beme hours.

Venice Project Making Heavy Use of RDF

Nova — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:28:36 +0000

I just found out from Pete, that the Venice Project is making really heavy use of RDF. Very interesting. Another major proof point. It’s looking like 2007 is going to be the year of mainstream RDF applications. It sounds like there are some similarities between what the Venice Project is making, on a platform level, and what we’ve already built on a platform level. Of course the application they are making (video syndication, as I understand it) and the application we are making (not video; not announced yet) are completely different.

What is the Semantic Web, Actually?

Nova — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 19:35:11 +0000

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 won’t be one Semantic Web, there will be thousands or even millions of them, each in their own area. They will all be part of one Semantic Web in that they will use the same open-standard languages and their data will be universally accessible, but they won’t all be run by any single company. They will connect together over time, forming a tapestry. But nobody will own this or run this as a single service. It will be just as decentralized as the Web already is.
The Semantic Web is not separate from the existing Web. The Semantic Web won’t be a new Web apart from the Web we already have. It simply adds new metadata and data to the existing Web. It merges right into the existing HTML Web just like XML does, except this new metadata is in RDF (since RDF can in fact be expressed in XML).
The Semantic Web is not just about unstructured data. In fact, the Semantic Web is really about structured data: it provides a means (RDF) to turn any content or data into structured data that other software can make use of. This is really what RDF enables.
The Semantic Web does not require complex ontologies. Even without making use of OWL and more sophisticated ontologies, powerful data-sharing and data-integration can be enabled on the existing Web using even just RDF alone.
The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web pages. RDF works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts — it’s not just about the Web, it’s about all information, data and applications.
The Semantic Web is not only about AI, and doesn’t require it. There are huge benefits from the Semantic Web without ever using a single line of artificial intelligence code. While the next-generation of AI will certainly be enabled by richer semantics, AI is not the only benefit of RDF. Making data available in RDF makes it more accessible, integratable, and reusable — regardless of any AI. The long-term future of the Semantic Web is AI for sure — but to get immediate benefits from RDF no AI is necessary.
The Semantic Web is not only about mining, search engines and spidering. Application developers and content providers, and end-users, can benefit from using the Semantic Web (RDF) within their own services, regardless of whether they expose that RDF metadata to outside parties. RDF is useful without doing any data-mining — it can be baked right into content within authoring tools and created transparently when information is published. RDF makes content more manageable and frees developers and content providers from having to look at relational data models. It also gives end-users better ways to collect and manage content they find.
The Semantic Web is not just research. It’s already in use and starting to reach the market. The government uses it of course. But also so do companies like Adobe, and more recently Yahoo (Yahoo Food has started to use some Semantic Web technologies now). And one flavor of RSS is defined with RDF. Oracle has released native RDF support in their products. The list goes on…

Learning more:

To learn about the technology of RDF, I recommend this terrific presentation by my friend Ian Davis.
This is my long-term outlook for the Web and the Semantic Web.
PlanetRDF is a good feed to read if you want to keep up with what’s going on in this field.
My own company, Radar Networks, is working on bringing the Semantic Web to the masses. You can sign up for our launch list at our site to be notified of future announcements.

Excellent Feedback from Om Malik

Nova — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 22:33:47 +0000

Today A-List blogger and emerging "media 2.0" mogul, Om Malik, dropped by our offices to get a confidential demo of what we are building. We’ve asked Om to keep a tight lid on what we showed him, but he may be releasing at least a few hints in the near future.

Om was there in the early days of the Web and really understands the industry and the content ecosystem. I remember running into him in NYC when I was a co-founder of EarthWeb. He’s seen a lot of technologies come and go, and he has a huge knowledgebase in his head. So he was an excellent person to speak to about what we are doing.

He gave us some of the most useful user-feedback about our product that we’ve ever gotten. One of our target audiences is content creators, and what Om is building over at Gigaom is a perfect example. He is a hard-core content creator. So he really understands deeply the market pain that we are addressing. And he had some incredibly useful comments, tweaks and suggestions for us. During the meeting there were quite a few Aha’s for me personally — Several new angles and benefits of our product. Meeting with folks like Om, who represent potential users of what we are building, is really helpful to us in understanding what the needs and preferences of content creators are today. I’m really excited to start doing some design around some of the suggestions he made.

Of course, the needs of content providers are only one half of the equation. We’re also addressing the needs of content consumers with our product. In order to really solve the problems facing content creators we also have to address the problems faced by their readers. It’s a full ecosystem, a virtuous cycle — a whole new dimension of the Web.

Radar Networks is Seeking Search Engineers for Large-Scale Web Mining Initiative

Nova — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:12:43 +0000

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 our team — specifically people with hands-on experience designing and building large-scale, high-performance Web crawling and text-mining systems. If you are interested, or you know anyone who is interested or might be qualified for this, please send them our way. This is your chance to help architect and build a really large and potentially important new system. You can read more specifics abour our open jobs here.

The Future of the Web is Semantic

Nova — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:23:28 +0000

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.

A Cool Thingy…

Nova — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 02:05:00 +0000

This is cool Click to see why. I think this idea has great value for viral, meme-based Web advertising. Just imagine: Advertisers could release really cool animations to add to sites, and site owners could add them into their sites for entertainment or humor. The animations could run ads within them as well. It’s fun. Everyone wins, everyone’s happy. And of course users can aim these animations at any other site so visitors who like it can spread it to their own sites. Very smart!!! Very Web 2.0.

Radar Networks News…

Nova — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 19:02:33 +0000

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.

Folktologies — Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology Distinction

Nova — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:28:17 +0000

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 in nature, and he argues against ontologies because pre-specification cannot anticipate the future. But this is a simplistic view of both approaches. One could just as easily argue against tagging systems because they don’t anticipate the future — they are shortsighted, now-oriented systems that fail to capture the "big picture" or to optimally organize resources for the long-term. Their saving grace is that over time they do (hopefully) self-organize and prune out the chaff, but that depends both on the level of participation and the quality of that participation.

Tagging is certainly useful — and indeed collaborative authoring,
editing and filtering are powerful paradigms — but folksonomies (at
least present day ones) suffer from having too little formal structure
– tagging systems easily result in "metadata soup." Ontologies are on
the other end of the spectrum — they are particulary useful for
accurately modeling the actual structure of the world, or of conceptual
domains — but admittedly in some cases their formal structure can be
overly rigid and specific. The benefit of tagging is primarily the
adaptive nature of the resulting taxonomies. The benefit of ontologies
is the rich, and unambiguous, semantics they define. Tagging systems
are useful when all that is needed is the ability to link items to
topics; ontologies are useful when what is needed is to rigorously
define or understand what is meant, or not meant, by particular
classes, fields and relationships — something that is essential for
good machine-processing of data.

One point that Clay makes, which I think is very interesting, is his
view that perhaps the world is moving from a graph-theory information
model (ontologies) to a set-theory model (folksonomies) — but in
fact, under the surface this argument falls apart. OWL is nothing other
than a language for enabling extremely sophisticated set-theoretic
operations on information. In fact, if you actually look at the OWL
language itself, it is primarily comprised of set-theoretic statements.
I don’t really view graph-theory and set-theory as mutually exclusive
– in fact, they are highly connected, if not equivalent at a deep
level. But expressing information in graph form or set form does have
different benefits for certain types of information processing. In
particular, graphs can be beneficial when associative reasoning is
important — for example, when traversing links or networks between
nodes is key. Sets on the other hand are useful when relevance or
mutual membership are most important.

Clay discounts ontologies for many reasons. He has many arguments,
most of which have some merit, but fall short of convincing me (or
anyone in the field of knowledge representation). Indeed, tagging
systems are just special, highly simplistic cases of ontologies –
namely, they are ontologies with extremely basic semantics and almost
no constraints — they are even lower on the spectrum than taxonomies.
In fact, we could graph the spectrum of knowledge management as follows:

<—————————————————————>

Tags Folders Taxonomies Databases Ontologies

One of Clay’s early arguments against ontologies was that they are
merely systems for syllogistic logic — but in fact, that is simply not
the case. While the formal semantics of OWL doe support logical
inferencing and reasoning, that is not the only value of ontologies. In
fact, I think a much more important benefit of ontologies is simply
that they make the semantics of data structures explicit — which makes
it much easier to both process information, and integrate information
across different applications and representations. Ontologies are, in
my opinion, simply the next evolution of database schemas. Surely, Clay
would not argue that database schemas have no place in the world!

Another way of looking at ontologies and the semantic web is that
they do for the meaning of data what other markup languages have done
for the layout and structure of data. HTML provided a way to markup the
formatting of content. XML provided a way to markup the structure of
content. RDF and OWL provide a way to markup the meaning of
information. This is a logical progression, and it is something that
will really make the Web, desktop and enterprise easier to cope with.
Ontologies are not panaceas — but they are incredibly powerful when
used appropriately. And that is the operative word — they are not for
everything. Indeed, in cases where social tagging is sufficient,
ontologies may simply be overkill. But there are many, many cases where
social tagging simply does not, and cannot, have the semantic rigour
that is needed.

So what’s next? I think that ultimately we will see a synthesis of
these two approaches emerge. Imagine a folksonomy combined with an
ontology — a "folktology." In a folktology, users could
instantly propose or modify ontological classes and properties in the
same manner that they do with tags in tagging systems. The most popular
ontological constructs (the most-instantiated classes, or slots on
classes, for example) would "rise to the top" and self-amplify, while
the less-instantiated ones would "fall to the bottom" over time. In
this way an emergent, self-organizing, and self-pruning ontology could
emerge within a community. Such a system would have the ease and
adaptability of a folksonomy plus the semantic richness and formal
structure of an ontology. I think ultimately a
folktology approach will be better than either
folksonomies or ontolgoies on their own.

My "A Physics of Ideas" Manifesto has been Published!

Nova — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:15:53 +0000

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 to provide feedback and even measure the popularity of various Manifestos. I’m happy this paper is getting noticed finally — I do think the ideas within it have potential. Take a look.

A Blog Novel

Nova — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 10:04:15 +0000

Rohit Gupta, a Bombay-based writer, who also reads this blog, is writing a blog-novel. He has come up with an innovative way to promote it — by letting readers choose quotes from his text to “own” — by choosing a quote and linking to his blog-novel from it, he will in return link back to your blog from that quote in his novel. It’s similar to my earlier GoMeme experiments, except in this case his novel is the meme that is spreading via a cooperative linking incentive.

Good idea, Rohit! I choose this quote from your novel:

“The other article, an interesting one, is a 2000-word piece on the history of mathematical heretics known as the Circlesquarers, and the transcendental nature of the number Π.“

Detailed Analysis of GoMeme 1.0 Results

Nova — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 17:03:50 +0000

Greg Tyrell, a PhD student with a strong interest in bioinformatics, has put together a detailed analysis and report on the GoMeme 1.0 experiment, containing several visualizations and results of the survey. Nice work Greg!

Also in other news, Google has started indexing the results. Currently there are 733 results when searching for sites with original, super-long GUID. There are 867 results when searching for the unique string “To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate” which was in the instructions — this number should include sites that did not put the whole GUID in. Technorati, which seems to be working better today, finds 58 sites with the long GUID, and none for the instructions text above. So I guess Google wins so far. But I am glad that Technorati is starting to get their bugs fixed! I noticed that blog stats are starting to be updated again.

I also got an interesting link to another Meme visualization, which although having nothing to do with our experiment as far as I can tell, is a nice concept. It takes forever to build out the full visualization and the tree appears to be almost white on my white background making it hard to see, but still worth a look — Meme Tree

Current State of the Weblog Tools Market

Nova — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 01:02:31 +0000

This article provides a good overview of the Weblog tools market, products, and market share.

GoMeme 2.0 – Help Test This Meme

Nova — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 14:11:31 +0000

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 is the second generation meme in our experiment in spreading ideas. To find out what a GoMeme is, and how this experiment works, or just to see how this GoMeme is growing and discuss it with others, visit the Root Posting and FAQ for this GoMeme at www.mindingtheplanet.net .

By adding this GoMeme to your Weblog you can get higher Google rankings for your site, and help your friends get higher Google rankings too. Your blog will be linked from every other blog that discovers this GoMeme downstream from your blog (from your readers, their readers, and so on). And that will raise your Google rankings in proportion to the number of downstream bloggers that get this GoMeme from you and post it to their blogs. The more people who blog the GoMeme from your blog, the better your Google rankings will get.

By hosting this meme on your blog, you will also be participating in an experiment to generate a distributed Blog survey and test how memes spread through social networks. The dataset from this experiment is public, open and decentralized — every blog that participates hosts their own data about their own blog. Anyone can then get the whole dataset by just searching Google for this unique string: 98818912959q This code is the “global unique identifier,” or GUID for this GoMeme — it marks every web page that participates in this GoMeme so that it can later be found with all the others. (Note it may take a week or longer before Google indexes your blog, so be patient).

Disclaimer

This is purely an experiment and is just for fun. We are really just curious to see what will happen and this is not a commercial project. Participation is voluntary. We don’t mean to annoy anyone. However, if you don’t have much curiosity, or at least a sense of humor, you may find this experiment to be upsetting. In that case, you might try drinking a good strong cup of coffee. If after that you are still unhappy with us, just don’t read any further and have a great day! (If you don’t want your blog to get better Google rankings, that’s purely your choice!) On the other hand, if you are interested in exploring new technologies and pushing the envelope, then keep reading and we look forward to your participation in this experiment. We also request that participants in this experiment refrain from spamming anyone with this GoMeme. To spread it, just put it on your blog; that should be enough.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ADDING THIS GOMEME TO YOUR OWN SITE

Step 1 First, to add your site to this experiment, copy the GoMeme to your site from the “Copy This GoMeme From Here” heading above to the End of this article. Please copy this whole article and try not to alter the text so that it is authentic for the people who get it from your blog. If you would like to come up with your own catchy headline, or anything else to help your GoMeme spread, feel free! Let’s see what works best.

Step 2: Now, fill in your answers to these Required Survey Fields (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers). These will later be automatically data-mined by bots to compile the survey results.

(1) I found this GoMeme at URL: http://www.mindingtheplanet.com

(2) I found this GoMeme on date (day/month/year):03/08/04

(3) I found this GoMeme at time (in GMT format): 01:00:00

(4) I foundit via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Browsing the Web

(5) I posted this GoMeme at my URL (use a hyperlink): Minding the Planet

(6) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 03/08/04

(7) I posted this at time (in GMT format): 01:00:00

(8) My posting location is (city, state, country): San Francisco, California, USA

Step 3: If you’re feeling very altruistic today, also fill in these optional survery fields (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(9) My Weblog is hosted by: Typepad

(10) My age is: 35

(11) My gender is: Male

(12) My occupation is: Internet Entrepreneur, Ontologist, Writer

(13) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Typepad, FeedDemon

(14) I use the following software to post to my blog: Typepad, Zempt

(15) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 05/08/03

(16) My web browser is: IE

(17) My operating system is: Windows XP

Step 4:Now add an entry for your site after the last entry in the PATH LIST below:
Your entry should be of the form: line number, URL, hyperlink, optional personal GUID for your blog.

(Note: If you would like to track all postings of the Meme that result from your posting of it, once Google has indexed them, you may add your own optional GUID after your hyperlink on your line of the Path List — just make sure it is short, unique, and doesn’t return any results on Google — for example “mysitename137a2r28″. Also note, if the path list gets too long, you should still try to include the whole path in your blog — even if you have to put the list on a continuation page rather than the excerpt for your posting — and make sure others copy the whole GoMeme along with your Path List when they get the GoMeme from you — If they don’t copy it, your blog and your upstream blogs won’t be linked from their blogs).

PATH LIST

1. http://www.mindingtheplanet.net Minding The Planet, mindingtheplanet14798
2. (your Path List entry goes here in the form URL, hyperlink, GUID. Also, please add a new line after this one, for the next person.)

The End

You did it! Now spread it! If all goes well and others find this GoMeme from your blog, you should see some interesting results. Please comment back on the original post and tell us how you’re doing or what you observe, if anything noteworthy happens.

Can You Imagine What Would Happen if MoveOn.Org Used the GoMeme Concept?

Nova — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 09:29:10 +0000

I wonder if anyone from MoveOn.Org or the Republicans will notice our GoMeme experiments? (Not that I’m taking sides — I’ll simply be happy if somebody wins the election!) Grassroots political campaigns could potentially really benefit from the techniques we’re testing here. For example, imagine a “blog meme” for a political campaign — a meme that states some useful facts about a candidate and their opponent, perhaps has some survey questions and a GUID, and has the added benefit of a cool Improve-Your-Google-Ranking-By-Hosting-This-Meme candy coating? Wow — it could spread the message to a lot of blogs pretty quickly if done right. That might actually work. But I try to stay out of politics, so I’m not taking sides here or endorsing anyone. If you read this and know the “right people” — feel free to suggest the idea to them.

FAQ for GoMeme 2.0

Nova — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 06:59:21 +0000

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 to your Website is located, here. Before you do this, please read this FAQ so you know how it works.

Introduction

This new GoMeme is better than the first design because it’s more beneficial to you to participate. Why? Because by participating in this GoMeme, you may be able to raise the Google rank and visibility of your blog. In other words, this GoMeme rewards your blog for hosting it.

In a nutshell, by following the instructions below, your blog will be linked from every other blog that discovers this GoMeme downstream from your blog. And that will raise your Google rankings.

How well does it work? Well, in the first experiment, www.mindingtheplanet.net, made it from not being in the list, all the way up to the number 3 position in the www.daypop.com Top 40 blogs index in just 2 days, even beating Matt Drudge, the New York Times, John Kerry, numerous cool movie trailers, and many other hot topics of the day. Now, in this new experiment, everyone can benefit in a similar way, by leveraging the power of their social networks. For instructions, keep reading…

This new version is also shorter and easier to participate in. For starters, you don’t have to copy all of this text into your blog, you just need the text from the “Copy This GoMeme From This Line” heading below to the end.

Is this Good or Evil?

Before we go much further, let’s clear up one burning question you might have: Is this evil? No, in fact it’s good, it’s altruistic and grassroots — you are helping to promote your friends’ weblogs, while pioneering the use of memes for marketing and pushing the envelope of how Weblogs and social networks can be used. Is this GoMeme a chain-letter? No, it is not a chain-letter, although it may seem like one at first glance. Chain letters are mailed to people, usually without the recipients asking for them. This GoMeme is voluntarily posted by you on your weblog and then voluntarily read and voluntarily spread by your visitors. It is really a vector for an idea — and for your weblog — just like any Weblog posting in fact. (Note: We do not condone chain-letters!)

What is a GoMeme?

So what is this GoMeme thing then? It is a new way to help your friends and get helped by them. It is a new way to grow your blogroll (the list of blogs that you link to from your blog) and a new way to get your blog listed in the blogrolls of other blogs in your social network. By participating in this GoMeme, you, and everyone in your social network, can then get higher Google rankings. Think of it as a much smarter social-network-based blogrolling community. You could actually use this beyond just Weblogs — you could use it to promote any site, or anything in fact. But Weblogs are the perfect medium because they are a form of “social software” — they naturally spread ideas, that’s the whole point of Weblogs.

You may also wonder, what is the actual “meme” being spread by this GoMeme? Well, looking at it one way, it is this entire posting. Looking at it another way, there are many memes within this posting, such as the concept of a “GoMeme” and the many other ideas here, the concept of growing a blogroll via a social network, and the concept of a blog, all of which are memes in their own right — and your weblog URL could soon be one of these memes, if you participate.

A Collaborative, Distributed, Emergent Blogroll

This GoMeme is effectively a collaborative, distributed, emergent blogroll. It is no different really than any blogroll (any list of other blogs you add to your blog) — it just forms in a different way. Instead of you adding all the links to it, your social network adds them and then you add yours at the end and send it on to others in your social network. There’s no top-down control or guidance of the process. Every blog that participates is equal. Nobody knows what the result of this experiment will be.

Why Are We Doing This?

OK, so why are we doing this? The short answer is, “Because we can!!!” But seriously, we’re also doing this because it is an interesting way to generate a dataset that we and others may study to analyze how ideas move across social relationships on the Web, and how communities can emerge and self-organize. It’s fun and it’s research, and anyway, it’s harmless and it helps bloggers get better visibility, so we figured we’d just try it and just see what happens! We hope you’ll join us!

How Does it Work?

Just follow the instructions to fill out your blog’s answers to the GoMeme survey and add your blog’s URL to the “PATH LIST” at the bottom of the GoMeme. The path list is the history of all the blogs that the meme traveled through to reach you. The last URL before yours in the path list should be the URL for the blog you discovered the GoMeme on. By adding your URL after it, your blog URL becomes part of the path for the GoMeme.

Everyone who gets the GoMeme downstream from you will then include your URL on their blog. And by doing that, they are in effect linking to your blog from their blog, which in turn raises your blog’s Google rank. By posting this GoMeme to your blog, you help raise the rankings of every blog in the path before yours, and every blog that later posts it as a result of your blog is then helping to raise your Google ranking. Kinda cool, huh?

Can Your Blog Out-Rank the A-List Blogs?

If the new GoMeme design works as we hypothesize it might, it could help a lot of lesser known blogs get better rankings than even the “A-List” blogs. In other words, it’s kind of like unionizing to beat the big guys. There is strength in numbers, after all. Let’s see if this works! If it does work, we should find lots of lesser-known blogs that participate in this experiment appearing in the “top lists” of the major blog indexes. Who knows, maybe we can even take over the top lists? For some proof, just look at the results of the first meme experiment which launched the Minding The Planet weblog to the number 3 slot of the Daypop Top 40 blog posting index in just two days! Who knows, maybe it will be your blog up there next?

OK, so do you want to add your Weblog to the GoMeme experiment??? Great, then Get the GoMeme!

RFC for a New Distributed Data Exchange System

Nova — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 00:11:52 +0000

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.

A New Blogging Feature: Automated "Social Syndication" Networks

Nova — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 21:35:23 +0000

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 central site. You get an account where you can profile your blog. You also set your blog’s syndication inputs — a set of other blogs that are also in the network that you are willing to automatically syndicate content from.

2. When you complete this, you are given an automatically generated HTML element containing a script to put in your blog sidebar, or anywhere else in your layout. This script is auto-generated for you from a central site that manages the network. The script automatically displays short excerpts for blog postings (pieces of microcontent) that have been “picked up” by your site from your registered “inputs” in the network. You place this script in your layout.

3. In the area created by the script in your site, you see a listing of blog postings that have been syndicated to your site from your inputs. You can post to your network by going to your account at the central network site and posting (or copying in the URL for anything you want to post) there. Any network-member sites that treat your node in the network as an “input” will then *automatically* pickup your posting and display it on their page.

Using this method, you might for example, post an article and suddenly have it appear syndicated across hundreds of sites that are downstream from you in the network. Your posting would cascade from node to node, via the network of nodes that directly or indirectly treat your node as an input.

Postings to the network would last for a certain number of hours or days and then expire. Furthermore, each member’s posting list would only have room to display perhaps 20 headlines in a list form, and preference would be given to postings that are more recent and from nodes that are closer to them in the network. Perhaps postings that were more popular could somehow last longer too, and get higher preference in listings. In this way the network would act as a natural filter.

Now, let’s just add one more feature. The postings that are syndicated in this manner could be similar to the Meme in the Meme Propagation experiment. Meaning that they could have an unique GUID on them so that you could easily find all places where the meme occurs. Better, yet, they could be actual objects — so the actual posting is syndicated, rather than a copy of it. Thus when people comment on it at different blogs, they are all really commenting on the same underlying data object — so all comments and activity around the posting are part of the original posting (this is in contrast to the way many blogs do citations — where each citation to a posting is really a new posting and comments that are added to it go directly onto it rather than onto the original posting, which causes fragmentation of the conversation).

So this concept provides for a means to syndicate memes across a social network of blogs that opt-in to auto-syndicate content from one another. A meme posted to your node could quickly appear across numerous downstream nodes in your network — effectively increasing your footprint for that posting. The central site could then track the statistics of memes in the network, administer the lifespans of memes, and provide useful overviews to the community.

Anyone want to code this? Let me know. I want to use it!

GoMeme 1.0 — Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

Nova — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 01:22:01 +0000

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."

How To Participate

We have created several versions of this meme in the course of the experiment. The latest version is GoMeme version 4.0. It is the most refined version; You should try this one if you are interested in participating.

Basically we are experimenting to see which kinds of conceptual motivations spread memes best. The first test was a survey which was purely altruistic. The second was survey with a selfish motivation — a path list so the participant benefits. The third used a humorous article as the host for the meme. The last one in the experiment used a "cause" as the host of the meme. Which one will be the most viral? It’s also an experiment in the concept of a path list — which helps blog authors see the extended upstream and downstream paths for things they post or find on their blogs.

The previous versions of the experiement are listed below for your reference:

- GoMeme 1.0 — Our first test. (The text for GoMeme 1.0 is located below, in this article, after the "Introduction to Gomeme 1.0" heading. This first test spread very rapidly but did not benefit the parties that helped spread it in any particular way.

- GoMeme 2.0 — A more evolved version. It has the benefit of not only spreading virally but also of rewarding every site that helps spread it with better Google rankings.

- GoMeme 3.0 — This is the most advanced version, and also the simplest and shortest. We abstracted the essential core of what makes a GoMeme spread and made it possible to attach it to any piece of content on the Web. So now anything can spread in this manner.

- GoMeme 4.0. This version is the latest and most refined of all. It is a very short posting that you can add to your blog. Unlike the earlier versions, it is focused around a cause — the cause of making blogs more visible! Let’s see if having a cause attached to a meme makes it spread more widely.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Note: The information below is the first version of our GoMeme experiment (GoMeme 1.0) — it has been replaced by more recent versions that are more sophisticated and that also reward every site that participates with higher Google rankings.

If you would like to test this out, we suggest you try either – GoMeme 2.0 or
- GoMeme 3.0

You may also want to read the GoMeme 3.0 FAQ

The most recent version is: GoMeme 4.0

The rest of this article, below, is the body text of
the original GoMeme 1.0. This is reproduced for informational purposes
only. The experiment is finished, please do not continue it.

———————————————————————————————————
GoMeme 1.0

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html ) — results and comments about the experiment appear at that location. (Note: If you want to replace this text version for the link for better formatting in your blog, please do at least include a hotlink back to the original post so that we can see your trackback).

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e (Note: this replaces the longer, original GUID — listed below — which didn’t format nicely in narrow column layouts. Those sites still using the longer GUID will still be found in the data set).

The above GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate, which may take several days or weeks. To locate the full data set, just search for the any sites that contain either the short GUID (above).

Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

To participate, follow the instructions, below…

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.mindingtheplanet.com

(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Browsing the Web

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.mindingtheplanet.com

(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 01/08/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 17:50:00

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): San Francisco, California, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Typepad

(8) My age is: 35

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Internet Entrepreneur, Ontologist, Writer

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Typepad, FeedDemon

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Typepad, Zempt

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 05/08/03

(14) My web browser is: IE

(15) My operating system is: Windows XP

New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph — The Future of the Net

Nova — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 04:07:24 +0000

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 a Web focused on relationships between things — what I call “The Relationship Web” or the “Relationship Revolution.”

We see early signs of this shift to a Web of relationships in the sudden growth of social networking systems. As the semantics of these relationships continue to evolve the richness of the “arcs” will begin to rival that of the “nodes” that make up the network.

This is similar to the human brain — individual neurons are not particularly important or effective on their own, rather it is the vast networks of relationships that connect them that encode knowledge and ultimately enable intelligence. And like the human brain, in the future Metaweb, technologies will emerge to enable the equivalent of “spreading activation” to propagate across the network of nodes and arcs. This will provide a means of automatically growing links, weighting links, making recommendations, and learning across distributed graphs of nodes and links. This may resemble a sort of “Hebbian learning” across the link structure of the network — enhancing the strength of frequently used connections and dampening less used links, and even growing new transitive links when appropriate.

As the intelligence with which such processes unfolds, in a totally decentralized and grassroots manner, we will begin to see signs of emergent “transhuman” intelligences on the network. Web services are the beginning of this — but imagine if they were connected to autonomous intelligent agents, roaming the network and able to interact with one another, Web sites, and even people. These next-layer intelligences will begin to function as brokers, associators, editors, publishers, recommenders, advertisers, researchers, defenders, buyers, sellers, monitors, aggregators, distributors, integrators, translators, and also as knowledge-stewards responsible for constantly improving the structure and quality of subsets of the Web that they oversee. And while many of these agents will be able to interact intelligently with humans, not all of them will — most will probably just have interfaces for interacting with other agents.

Vast systems of “hybrid intelligence” (humans + intelligent software) will form — for example, next-generation communities that intelligently self-organize around emerging topics and trends, smart marketplaces that self-optimize to reduce the cost of transactions for their participants, ‘group minds’ and ‘enterprise minds’ that embody and manage the collective cognitiion of teams and organizations, and knowledge networks that function to enable distributed collective intelligence among networks of indivdiuals, across communities and business-relationships.

As the network becomes increasingly autonomous and self-organizing we may say that the network-as-a-whole is becoming “intelligent.” But it will be several steps beyond that before it finally “wakes up” — when the various processes of the network reach that point at which the entire system truly functions as a coordinated, self-aware intelligence. This will require the formation of many higher layers of intelligence — leading to something that functions like the cerebral cortex in humans. It will also require something that functions as its virtual “self-awareness” — an internal process of meta-level self-representation, self-projection, self-feedback, self-analysis and self-improvement within the network. For a map of how this may actually unfold over time we might look at the evolutionary history of nervous systems on Earth.

As structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network emerge, connect to one another, and gain sophistication, the Global Brain will self-organize into a Global Mind — the intelligence of the whole will begin to outpace the intelligence of any of its parts and thus it will cross the threshold from being just a “bunch of interacting parts” to “a new higher-order whole” in its own right — a global intelligent Metaweb for our planet.

Ads Moving to Weblogs… Ad Space on My Site for Sale

Nova — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 01:45:44 +0000

Advertising moves to Weblogs. It had to happen eventually. Now that we’re on the subject, let me know if you want to advertise on this site.

As I predicted .. Lifelogs are coming…

Nova — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:39:44 +0000

I call it a Lifelog — Nokia calls it a “Lifeblog” (my terminology is better) — but it’s the same idea — a log of all the stuff you experience — your whole life, blogged and online. OK but the key is to make sure I can keep my lifeblog private — or at least parts of it private! I would like my camera phone to take a photo every minute and add it to my Lifelog automatically. Then I can speed through it flip-book-animation style to get to a section I am interested in. Next would be to add a digital streaming voice recorder to my phone and record whatever is being said on every phone call, and even when I am not on a call at 1 minute intervals. Using voiceprints and speech-to-text we can then index who was speaking and what was said as a way to search and navigate the Lifelog — for example, this would make it possible to find all photos that correspond to times when Sue was speaking about “Internet.” With a little more work we could link this to additional semantics and make it really searchable.

Blogging by the Numbers

Nova — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 16:58:07 +0000

Here are some good stats on the size of the blogosphere.

From Application-Centric to Data-Centric Computing: The Metaweb

Nova — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 02:41:03 +0000

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 relationships and meaning.

As higher levels of metadata are adopted and added to content, the content becomes “smarter” — more information about how to display, use and interpret the content is added to the content itself. The key here is that this metadata is added in an application-independent manner. In other words, the “intelligence” for interpreting the data is moved out of applications and into the data itself. Thus we move from “smart applications, dumb data” to “smart applications, smart data.”

A data-centric world will be very different from the application-centric world of today — for one thing, application providers will lose much of their competitive advantages (from platform lock-in and closed formats) as data becomes increasingly portable across various tools. Another big change will be in how we think about content — rather than content being thought of as static documents, every piece of content will be more like an object with its own unique identity and behaviors on the network.

Instead of moving data around we will access these semantic data objects using Web services protocols and interact with them from anywhere like mini-online services. To edit a document we might send commands to an object that represents the document on the network, rather than actually downloading and modifying a local file.

Ultimately this will bring about a shift from desktop computing to network computing — software will truly become a service and the business model of software will shift to be more like online service business models — based on subscriptions, a la carte pay-per-use features, and perhaps even advertising. Data objects will be accessible from everywhere and will be responsible for maintaining their own state, relationships and contents, as well as managing their own access, rights and usage policies. These are some of the changes that will come about as the Metaweb evolves.

The Metaweb is Coming… See this Diagram…

Nova — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 17:36:54 +0000

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.

Blogging Study Stats Released

Nova — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 16:53:08 +0000

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.

The Pattern of Social Technology Evolution

Nova — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 17:19:06 +0000

Here is my strategic outlook on the evolution of online technologies: past, present and future. Please see the table below. Commentary follows the table…
style='width:520.7pt;mso-cellspacing:0in;mso-padding-alt:0in 0in 0in 0in'>

Content

Communication

Collaboration

Community

Commerce

1980’s

The Net

Desktop Publishing

Phone, Fax, Email

Database Applications

BBS’s style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'> & On-line
Services

Phone, Fax, Early EDI

1990’s

The Web

Web Publishing & Web Sites

PIM’s style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'>, E-mail & IM,
Phone, Fax

Groupware, KM, and Intranets

Web Portals

Web Stores & Marketplaces

2000’s

The Metaweb

Weblogs style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'> & RSS style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'>

(“Microcontent” and “Personal
Publishing”)

E-Mail, Webmail, IM, VOIP, Video
Conferencing & Web Conferencing

Wikis style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'>, Decentralized
Collaboration & Semantic Webs

Social Networks & “Friendsware”

XML Web Services & Web Services Exchanges

2010’s

The Semantic Web

K-logs, Lifelogs & Personal
Portals

Microcontent style='color:#333333'> becomes primary enterprise KM medium. All information
about a person is stored in their Lifelog. Everyone
gets their own personal portal. Semantic routing of content becomes part of
network stack.

Unified Communications

Persistent identity and
relationship management across all devices, software, and networks enables
seamlessly integrated synchronous and asynchronous communications.

Group Minds & Collective Intelligence

Anyone can know what everyone
knows; everyone can know what anyone knows.

New levels of collective
intelligence are enabled by fusion of Semantic Web with distributed agents
and knowledge management tools.

Emergent Communities

Communities spontaneously
emerge and self-organize around memes (hot topics). Communities are
decentralized; no longer “hosted” in any single location or controlled by any
single service provider

Intelligent Marketplaces

Intelligent commerce agents
interact semi-autonomously in a decentralized global marketplace.Self-optimizing
trading networks

What we see is that “Social Networks” are the current-day entrant in the “Community” category. As the 1990’s taught us, the Community category did not prove to be a big money-maker — except for organizations that focused on becoming portals and eventually marketplaces, such as Yahoo!. Organizations that focused primarily on providing online communities became “features” rather than “stand-alone businesses” over time, and were either acquired or went out of business.

Communities can generate revenues from advertising and in some cases, paid subscriptions, however incremental revenue growth was primarily attained through commerce and classified advertising. If Social Networking services are to “make it” as businesses they will have to trend in this direction — those that do not will go the way of the 1990’s-era community sites.

Similarly, companies that sell “Social Networking Software Platforms” are simply the current-day equivalent of companies that sold “Community Platforms” in the 1990’s. Those companies morphed into Web conferencing and collaboration companies, or were acquired, or went out of business. The key lesson here is that mere “Community Platform” companies did not become big businesses in their own right — those that survived had to either verticalize or focus on enterprise collaboration. The same will be true of companies that provide platforms for social networking in the enterprise.

More commentary to come soon…

	Content	Communication	Collaboration	Community	Commerce
1980’s The Net	Desktop Publishing	Phone, Fax, Email	Database Applications	BBS’s style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'> & On-line Services	Phone, Fax, Early EDI
1990’s The Web	Web Publishing & Web Sites	PIM’s style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'>, E-mail & IM, Phone, Fax	Groupware, KM, and Intranets	Web Portals	Web Stores & Marketplaces
2000’s The Metaweb	Weblogs style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'> & RSS style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'> (“Microcontent” and “Personal Publishing”)	E-Mail, Webmail, IM, VOIP, Video Conferencing & Web Conferencing	Wikis style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:#333333'>, Decentralized Collaboration & Semantic Webs	Social Networks & “Friendsware”	XML Web Services & Web Services Exchanges
2010’s The Semantic Web	K-logs, Lifelogs & Personal Portals Microcontent style='color:#333333'> becomes primary enterprise KM medium. All information about a person is stored in their Lifelog. Everyone gets their own personal portal. Semantic routing of content becomes part of network stack.	Unified Communications Persistent identity and relationship management across all devices, software, and networks enables seamlessly integrated synchronous and asynchronous communications.	Group Minds & Collective Intelligence Anyone can know what everyone knows; everyone can know what anyone knows. New levels of collective intelligence are enabled by fusion of Semantic Web with distributed agents and knowledge management tools.	Emergent Communities Communities spontaneously emerge and self-organize around memes (hot topics). Communities are decentralized; no longer “hosted” in any single location or controlled by any single service provider	Intelligent Marketplaces Intelligent commerce agents interact semi-autonomously in a decentralized global marketplace.Self-optimizing trading networks