Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses on ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
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 BBC World Service’s Business Daily show interviewed the CTO of Xerox and me, about the future of the Web, printing, newspapers, search, personalization, the real-time Web. Listen to the audio stream here. I hear this will only be online at this location for 6 more days. If anyone finds it again after that let [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
If you are interested in collective intelligence, consciousness, the global brain and the evolution of artificial intelligence and superhuman intelligence, you may want to see my talk at the 2008 Singularity Summit. The videos from the Summit have just come online. (Many thanks to Hrafn Thorisson who worked with me as my research assistant for [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I’m here at the BlogTalk conference in Cork, Ireland with a range of bloggers and technologists discussing the emerging social Web. Including myself, Ian Davis and Paul Miller from Talis, there are also a bunch of other Semantic Web folks including Dan Brickley, and a group from DERI Galway. Over dinner a few of us [...]
My company’s product, Twine.com, has made it to the finalist round in the Crunchies, a new annual tech industry awards competition, under the Best Technical Achievement category. Please help us win by casting your vote for Twine here. Thanks! UPDATE: It turns out, that for some odd reason the Crunchies allows each voter to vote [...]
Now that I have been asked by several dozen people for the slides from my talk on "Making Sense of the Semantic Web," I guess it’s time to put them online. So here they are, under the Creative Commons Attribution License (you can share it with attribution this site). You can download the Powerpoint file [...]
The most interesting and exciting new app I’ve seen this month (other than Twine of course!) is a new semantic search engine called True Knowledge. Go to their site and watch their screencast to see what the next generation of search is really going to look like. True Knowledge is doing something very different from [...]
My company, Radar Networks, has just come out of stealth. We’ve announced what we’ve been working on all these years: It’s called Twine.com. We’re going to be showing Twine publicly for the first time at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. There’s lot’s of press coming out where you can read about what we’re doing in [...]
Jason just blogged his take on an official definition of "Web 3.0" — in his case he defines it as better content, built using Web 2.0 technologies. There have been numerous responses already, but since I am one of the primary co-authors of the Wikipedia page on the term Web 3.0, I thought I should [...]
I’m posting this in response to a recent post by Tim O’Reilly which focused on disambiguating what the Semantic Web is and is not, as well as the subject of Collective Intelligence. I generally agree with Tim’s post, but I do have some points I would add by way of clarification. In particular, in my [...]
I’ve been looking around for open-source libraries (preferably in Java, but not required) for extracting data and metadata from common file formats and Web formats. One project that looks very promising is Aperture. Do you know of any others that are ready or almost ready for prime-time use? Please let me know in the comments! [...]
Microsoft’s Astoria project has decided to make RDF a lower priority and is not supporting it for now. So much for Microsoft participating in the Semantic Web. The Astoria project page describes the project thusly: The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be [...]
A very cool experiment in virtual reality has shown it is possible to trick the mind into identifying with a virtual body: Through these goggles, the volunteers could see a camera view of their own back – a three-dimensional "virtual own body" that appeared to be standing in front of them. When the researchers stroked [...]
In recent months we have witnessed a number of social networking sites begin to open up their platforms to outside developers. While this trend has been exhibited most prominently by Facebook, it is being embraced by all the leading social networking services, such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Myspace and others. Along separate dimensions we also see [...]
Web 3.0 — aka The Semantic Web — is about enriching the connections of the Web. By enriching the connections within the Web, the entire Web may become smarter. I believe that collective intelligence primarily comes from connections — this is certainly the case in the brain where the number of connections between neurons far [...]
The Business 2.0 Article on Radar Networks and the Semantic Web just came online. It’s a huge article. In many ways it’s one of the best popular articles written about the Semantic Web in the mainstream press. It also goes into a lot of detail about what Radar Networks is working on. One point of [...]
It’s been an interesting month for news about Radar Networks. Two significant articles came out recently: Business 2.0 Magazine published a feature article about Radar Networks in their July 2007 issue. This article is perhaps the most comprehensive article to-date about what we are working on at Radar Networks, it’s also one of the better [...]