Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

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. [...]

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 [...]

Grupthink is a service where anyone can create and participate in polls on various subjects. It’s similar to an idea I once had about polling the global mind in real-time (although their system does not show votes happening in real-time, presently). It reminds me of several other Web 2.0 sites, but it’s nicely done. Worth [...]

Japanese cell phone company KDDI is offering a new GPS-enabled 3D navigational tool to their 17 million subscribers (see article and picture). Their system helps consumers navigate city streets and even within buildings, using an innovative 3D map and audio directions. This system is similar to (but possibly more advanced than) the in-car navigation systems [...]

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 [...]

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.

Here is an interesting article about an analysis of SMS messaging versus e-mail messaging on mobile networks. The conclusion is that e-mail messaging is more efficient for mobile consumers because email networks are scale-free networks. The article predicts that services based on scale-free topologies will ultimately win out over less optimal alternatives. Thanks to Murli.

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 [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]

Great find from Rob Usey at Psydex Corporation: This article is a survey of the emerging field of “sociophysics” which attempts to apply statistical mechanics to predict human social behavior. It’s very cool stuff if you’re interested in social networks, memes, sociology and prediction science. The article discusses recent progress towards Isaac Asimov’s vision for [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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."

Forget about DRM and legal action to prevent piracy — there is a better way: Superdistribution harnesses basic human drives to save money and make money. It’s more powerful than copy protection, more powerful than ethical arguments, and more powerful even than fear of legal prosecution. A recent article points out that in 2003 around [...]

Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers) Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net) INTRODUCTION This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater. DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE The Semantic [...]

Here is a cool new kind of complex system I am thinking about a lot that we might call a “network-automaton” or a “graph automaton” — a system that evolves networks (graphs) over time. This rule is similar to cellular automata rules such as the famous “Life” rule discovered by John Conway, however instead of computing [...]

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 [...]

I have been using Earthlink’s built-in spam filter on my personal email — it works really well. It is basically a whitelist system: Any messages from pre-approved parties get through to me while anything else goes into a “suspect email” folder for me to look at and potentially approve or delete. This doesn’t really eliminate [...]

Google has announced the beta of their new search-based free hosted e-mail service, called gmail. They will provide 1 gigabyte of free storage to every user, with built-in indexing and search. Wow.

LOAF, A new decentralized approach to filtering email by sharing addressbook information with your friends (without giving away your addressbooks) may be the solution we’ve all been looking for to the growing problem of spam.

This is a very well thought-out critical review of the pros and cons of various social networking sites. Full of insights for those of us in the biz.

This is a really good article with a cool illustration of how news moves across the Metaweb. Definitely take a look at it.

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 [...]

It would be cool if there was a way to automatically make and serve an RSS feed from my daily IE history — this feed would be a running stream of every URL I look at every day. It would be generated by a little floating utility on my desktop. The utility would allow me [...]