Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here.
This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer [...]

We are so focused on how to improve present-day search engines. But that is a kind of mental myopia. In fact, a more interesting and fruitful question is why do people search at all? What are they trying to accomplish? And is there a better way to help them accomplish that than search?
Instead of finding [...]

This is a series of screenshots that demo the latest build of the consumer experience and developer tools for Twine.com’s “T2″ semantic search product. This is still in internal alpha — not released to public yet.
Twine T2 Demo & Dev Tools (Screenshots Series)
View more presentations from Twine.com.

This is the story of Twine.com — our early research (with never before seen screenshots of our early semantic desktop work), and our evolution from Twine 1.0 towards Twine 2.0 (“T2″) which is focused on semantic search.
A Yarn About Twine — ISWC 2009 Keynote — Nova Spivack
View more presentations from Twine.com.

This is a talk I have given many times, on the past, present and future evolution of the Web, and particularly the Semantic Web.

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine
View more presentations from Twine.com.

In typical Web-industry style we’re all focused minutely on the leading trend-of-the-year, the real-time Web. But in this obsession we have become a bit myopic. The real-time Web, or what some of us call “The Stream,” is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. So what will it enable, where is [...]

The next generation of Web search is coming sooner than expected. And with it we will see several shifts in the way people search, and the way major search engines provide search functionality to consumers.
Web 1.0, the first decade of the Web (1989 – 1999), was characterized by a distinctly desktop-like search paradigm. The overriding [...]

Sneak Preview of Siri – The Virtual Assistant that will Make Everyone Love the iPhone, Part 2: The Technical Stuff

In Part-One of this article on TechCrunch, I covered the emerging paradigm of Virtual Assistants and explored a first look at a new product in this category called Siri. In this article, Part-Two, I interview [...]

If you are interested in semantics, taxonomies, education, information overload and how libraries are evolving, you may enjoy this video of my talk on the Semantic Web and the Future of Libraries at the OCLC Symposium at the American Library Association Midwinter 2009 Conference. This event focused around a dialogue between David Weinberger and myself, [...]

Twine has been growing at 50% per month since launch in October. We've been keeping that quiet while we wait to see if it holds. VentureBeat just noticed and did an article about it. It turns out our January numbers are higher than Compete.com estimates and February is looking strong too. We have a slew [...]

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.

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 [...]

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

Video from my panel at DEMO Fall ‘08 on the Future of the Web is now available.
I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:
Howard Bloom, Author, The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google Inc.
Jon Udell, Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
Prabhakar Raghavan, PhD, Head of Research and [...]

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
—————
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 [...]

Tim Berners-Lee is giving a talk, and then we’re on a panel, live, today, discussing the Semantic Web, Net Neturality and Web Science. Watch the live Webcast and submit your questions to the panel interactively. Details and times are here.

Melissa Pierce is a filmmaker who is making a film about "Life in Perpetual Beta." It’s about how people who are adapting and reinventing themselves in the moment, and a new philosophy or approach to life. She’s interviewed a number of interesting people, and while I was in Chicago recently, she spoke with me as [...]

Here is the full video of my talk on the Semantic Web at The Next Web 2008 Conference. Thanks to Boris and the NextWeb gang!

John Mills, one of the engineers behind Twine, recently wrote up an interesting article discussing our approach to semantic tags. It’s a good read for folks who think about the Semantic Web and tags.

This is a brief post with one purpose: to clarify the meaning of the term "semantic." It has suddenly become chic to label every new app as somehow "semantic" but what does this mean really? Are all "semantic" apps part of the "Semantic Web?" What is the criteria for something to be "semantic" versus "Semantic [...]

Our present day search engines are a poor match for the way that our brains actually think and search for answers. Our brains search associatively along networks of relationships. We search for things that are related to things we know, and things that are related to those things. Our brains not only search along these [...]

This is a video of my talk at the Digital Now conference in Orlando yesterday. There’s a long intro by Don Dea, and then I speak (starting at index 05:14) about the Semantic Web and Twine.

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who’s Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about “Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web.”
Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you [...]

If you are interested in hearing about how some users are using the Twine invite-only beta test, here is a great article about why one user migrated to Twine from del.icio.us.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a very nice fan video for Twine created by a high-school student who is in our beta test. It gives the flavor of Twine and is really nice.

This is a five minute video in which I was asked to make some predictions for the next decade about the Semantic Web, search and artificial intelligence. It was done at the NextWeb conference and was a fun interview.

Learning from the Future with Nova Spivack from Maarten on Vimeo.

Tim Berners-Lee just posted his thoughts about the importance of Linked Data on the Semantic Web. Linked data support is built-into Twine. All the data in Twine is accessible as open-standard RDF and OWL today and will be accessible to other applications via several API’s including SPARQL. You can learn more about Twine’s support for [...]

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to visit, and speak at, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), located in Galway, Ireland. My hosts were Stefan Decker, the director of the lab, and John Breslin who is heading the SIOC project.
DERI has become the world’s premier research institute for the Semantic Web. Everyone working in [...]

This week we began letting the second wave of beta users into the Twine invite-only beta. It’s been a very busy and exciting time for the Twine team. I’ll be providing more detailed stats on an ongoing basis in a few weeks once we have more data to analyze. For now, I will just provide [...]

The Beginning of the Mainstream Semantic Web?
It is being reported that Yahoo will be indexing a wide array of structured metadata, including Semantic Web metadata. This will make Yahoo’s search index potentially better than Google’s, although it will also open their index up to sophisticated attempts to “game the system” as well that will need [...]