Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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!
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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.
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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 [...]

Carla Thompson, an analyst for Guidewire Group, has written what I think is a very insightful article about her experience participating in the early-access wave of the Twine beta.
We are now starting to let the press in and next week we will begin to let waves of people in from our over 30,000 user [...]

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 were [...]

Question: What do you do if you’re not a computer scientist but you are interested in understanding what all this Semantic Web stuff is about?
Answer: Watch this video!

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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 New Scientist just posted a quick video preview of Twine to YouTube. It only shows a tiny bit of the functionality, but it’s a sneak peak.
We’ve been letting early beta testers into Twine and we’re learning a lot from all the great feedback, and also starting to see some cool new uses of [...]

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 Twine [...]

Dan Farber has an interesting piece today about how user-contributed metadata will revolutionize online advertising. He mentions Facebook, Metaweb and Twine as examples. I agree, of course, with Dan’s thoughts on this, since these are some of the underlying motivations of Twine. The rich user-generated metadata in Twine is not just about users however, it’s [...]

Last night I saw that the video of my presentation of Twine at the Web 2.0 Summit is online. My session, "The Semantic Edge," featured Danny Hillis of Metaweb demoing Freebase, Barney Pell demoing Powerset, and myself Demoing Twine, followed by a brief panel discussion with Tim O’Reilly (in that order). It’s a good panel [...]

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 [...]

News Flash!
My company, Radar Networks, is coming out of stealth this Friday, October 19, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. I’ll be speaking on "The Semantic Edge Panel" at 4:10 PM, and publicly showing our Semantic Web online service for the first time. If you are planning to come to Web 2.0, [...]

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 poking around in the DBpedia, and I’m amazed at the progress. It is definitely one of the coolest (launched) example of the Semantic Web I’ve seen. It’s going to be a truly useful resource to everyone. If you haven’t heard of it yet, check it out!
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I’m sitting the Dynasty Lounge in Taipei, enroute to Singpore where I will be addressing ministers of the government there on the potential of the Semantic Web. Singapore is a very forward-looking country and they have some very exciting new initiatives in the works there. After that I hope to have a little time for [...]

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 outnumbers [...]

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 clarification, [...]

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 articulations [...]

We had a bunch of press hits today for my startup, Radar
Networks…
PC World  Article on  Web 3.0 and Radar Networks
Entrepreneur Magazine interview
We’re also proud to announce that Jim
Hendler, one of the founding gurus of the Semantic Web, has joined our technical advisory board.
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The MIT Technology Review just published a large article on the Semantic Web and Web 3.0, in which Radar Networks, Metaweb, Joost, RealTravel and other ventures are profiled.
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This is just a brief post because I am actually slammed with VC meetings right now. But I wanted to congratulate our friends at Metaweb for their pre-launch announcement. My company, Radar Networks, is the only other major venture-funded play working on the Semantic Web for consumers so we are thrilled to see more action [...]

It’s been a while since I posted about what my stealth venture, Radar Networks, is working on. Lately I’ve been seeing growing buzz in the industry around the "semantics" meme — for example at the recent DEMO conference, several companies used the word "semantics" in their pitches. And of course there have been some fundings [...]

Here is my timeline of the past, present and future of the Web. Feel free to put this meme on your own site, but please link back to the master image at this site (the URL that the thumbnail below points to) because I’ll be updating the image from time to time.

This slide illustrates my [...]

Wow — there has been quite a firestorm over the term Web 3.0 on the blogosphere today and yesterday. While I am remaining neutral, I also have an open mind regarding what it could be defined to represent. Here are some random thoughts towards defining term:
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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 [...]

A New York Times article came out today about the Semantic Web — in which I was quoted, speaking about my company Radar Networks. Here’s an excerpt:
Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very
idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable
vision. But the underlying technologies [...]