Minding the Planet

Let's Move Their Market Caps By Several Hundred Million! -- My Panel

I'm moderating a panel at the upcoming DEMOfall 2008 conference this year on Where the Web is Going.

I've assembled an all-star cast of panelists, including:

Ross Levinsohn, Partner, Velocity Interactive Group

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 Search Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.

You can read more about it here. I hope you can attend!

I'm hoping that the market caps of some big public companies go up or down by a few hundred million after this panel. Stock brokers will be standing by to take your orders! :^)

Please Vote for Twine! Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards

Great news. Twine is a finalist in the Industry Standard’s Innovation 100 Awards. Twine / Radar Networks was chosen as a finalist in the community category.

 

There will be one "winner" in each category depending on which companies and products receive the most community votes in each category.  You may vote for one company/product in each category.  Voting will close at midnight Pacific Time on October 3, 2008.

 

So please vote for Twine!!! 

 

Follow Me on FriendFeed

As well as Twine, I am also enjoying Friendfeed. They are complementary services. Twine is about sharing and discovering information about your interests, and Friendfeed is about keeping up with your friends and what they are up to on the Web. If you want to track me on Friendfeed, you can follow me here.

How To Use Twine -- Screencast!

I have made a screencast that teaches you how to get started using Twine, and explains most of the features, best-practices for using it, and where we are headed with the product. You can read more about it and discuss it with me here.

For anyone who is new to Twine, this will be really helpful. Once you see this you will understand what Twine is for and how you can start to benefit from it right away.

The high-quality version is here.

For those who prefer YouTube's lower-quality here is the first part. Note that YouTube requires that videos are less than 10 minutes but the whole screencast is about 30 minutes, so I had to break it into parts. Here is Part 1 of 4:

And here is the rest of it in YouTube format:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

The Next Evolution of the Bookmark -- Beyond Del.icio.us?

I just posted an article on how bookmarking is evolving, in response to the discussion about "Who Bookmarks Anymore?" that I found on Techmeme. Del.icio.us was a start. Twine is taking it somewhere new. Read about it on my public twine, here.

The Future of the Desktop

(Brief excerpt from a new post on my Public Twine -- Go there to read the whole thing and comment on it with me and others...).

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 come up so far.

This is a raw, first-draft of what I think it will be like.

Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

No. We've already seen several attempts at doing that -- and they never catch on. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC.

Partly this is due to the difference in user experience between using real live folders, windows and menus on a local machine and doing that in "simulated" fashion via some Flash-based or HTML-based imitation of a desktop.

Web desktops to-date have simply have been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it.

Whoever does succeed in nailing this opportunity will have a real shot at becoming a very important player in the next-generation of the Web, Web 3.0.

From the points above it should be clear that I think the future of the desktop is going to be significantly different from what our desktops are like today.

It's going to be a hosted web service

Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there is going to be some kind of interface that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it will become unified across devices.

Currently we have different spaces on different devices (laptop, mobile device, PC). These will merge. In order for that to happen they will ultimately have to be provided as a service via the Web. Local clients may be created for various devices, but ultimately the most logical choice is to just use the browser as the client.

Our desktop will not come from any local device and will always be available to us on all our devices.

 

The skin of your desktop will probably appear within your local device's browser as a completely dynamically hosted web application coming from a remote server. It will load like a Web page, on-demand from a URL.

This new desktop will provide an interface both to your local device, applications and information, as well as to your online life and information.

Instead of the browser running inside, or being launched from, some kind of next-generation desktop web interface technology, it's will be the other way around: The browser will be the shell and the desktop application will run within it either as a browser add-in, or as a web-based application.

The Web 3.0 desktop is going to be completely merged with the Web -- it is going to be part of the Web. There will be no distinction between the desktop and the Web anymore.

Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an applicaiton. But actually it will be the other way around in the future: Our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.

The focus shifts from information to attention

As our digital lives shift from being focused on the old fashioned desktop (space-based metaphor) to the Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (river of news, feeds, blogs, lifestreaming, microblogging).

Instead of being a big directory, the desktop of the future is going to be more like a Feed reader or social news site. The focus will be on keep up with all the stuff flowing through and what the trends are, rather than on all the stuff that is stored there already.

The focus will be on helping the user to manage their attention rather than just their information.

This is a leap to the meta-level. A second-order desktop. Instead of just being about the information (the first-order), it is going to be about what is happening with the information (the second-order).

It's going to shift us from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

Our digital roles are already shifting from effectively acting as "librarians" to becoming more like "daytraders." We are all focusing more on keep up with change than on organizing information today. This will continue to eat up more of our attention...

Read the rest of this on my public Twine! http://www.twine.com/item/11bshgkbr-1k5/the-future-of-the-desktop

Subscribe to my Public Twine!

Twine is starting to gradually open up.

Today we quietly made all the public content in Twine visible to the public and search engines. We're not doing a big announcement about this. We plan to do that in the fall when we launch some important new features.

But the good news is that now that our content is visible, you can read my twine in your browser even if you are not yet a member, and you can subscribe to my  twine by RSS -- just use the RSS link from here: http://www.twine.com/twine/1p2dqhdx-1jg/nova-spivack-my-public-twine.

I also invite you to join my twine, so we can have discussions and share things we think are interesting.

See you on Twine!

Blogging is Dead! Long Live Blogging! Why I'm Twining Instead of Blogging.

I love how my friend, Jason Calacanis, announces the death of blogging and his retirement from blogging...on a blog. He's a genius. You can read more here and here.

But as anyone who reads this blog knows, I try to be ahead of the curve. In keeping with that, I announced something similar last week. Sorry Jason, I beat you to it. 

Unlike Jason, however, I haven't left blogging. Instead, my blogging has evolved and is moving into a better medium. Jason wants to go back to old fashioned email mailing lists, but I'm moving forward into something even better than blogs.

Blogs will continue of course, but for those of us who do a lot of blogging and online bookmarking, social networking, online discussions, and social media sharing -- blogs just aren't productive enough anymore. Neither are social networks or the other tools available today. Because of that, I believe that an increasing amount of activity is going to move off of today's blogs and into a new kind of social media environment. I call these next generation services, interest networks, and my company is building one of the first: Twine.

Interest networking is, I believe, the next evolution of social media. The next step after blogs, aggregators, personal home pages, and social networks. It brings them all together into a new synthesis that is finally what we all really were trying to achieve with all those separate tools in the first place. Interest networks are a big step towards a more unified, productive, and manageable social media environment.

I still blog here from time to time, but it's just a fraction of the online authoring and conversations I participate in now -- instead, the vast majority of my social media activity is taking place in Twine. I'm Twining a lot more than I'm blogging or participating in social networking -- probably by a factor of 100X.

Why have I been doing so much more Twining than blogging and social networking? First of all, I'm not interested in having a conversation with the entire general public, or ever being an A-List blogger, or interacting with networks of random strangers. What I want is to efficiently participate in many different specific groups and communities around particular interests and relationships I have.

Some of my interest communities are relevant to each other but many are not, and it would not make sense to combine them all into one blog or network (which is what present-day blogs and social networks require). In Twine it's super easy to create the equivalent of microblogs, microcommunities, and micronetworks, or to join and participate in, existing ones started by others, around any person, group or interest.

Some of my interest communities are public and many are private (for teams, for private discussions, etc). But I don't want to have to run many blogs or networks for all these different communities I want to converse with -- that's just too much work. Instead, in Twine it is extremely easy to do everything I need to do in one place.

In Twine I can create, join and converse with a large number of different individuals, groups and communities around particular interests, goals, activities and relationships I have. Many of my Twine interactions are public but some are private. They are not all structured or governed in the same way. Twine helps me manage them all, and participate efficiently to author content, track what others are saying, as well as to share and distribute my ideas, participate in discussions, and discover new things around my interests. That's what Twine was built to for.

Twine enables me to connect with others around my interests, the way I really want to. It's easier and smarter than blogging or other forms of social media. Of course, it's still a work in progress; we're still in beta and it's not perfect or even fully built yet. But it's getting there.

Twine has been making great headway in inventing and defining what interest networks should be like. Soon we are going to start opening Twine up to the wider Web. Very soon in fact. And then, as we move into the fall and winter release timeframes, we are going to be rolling out some important new capablities that may be very disruptive. Stay tuned. There are going to be a series of cool things happening in Twine during the remainder of this summer, and this year.

I agree with Jason -- blogging isn't good enough. The first wave of social media is ending -- for some because they couldn't cope with the overload, for others because they want a better medium. I believe interest networks are what's next and I hope to make Twine into the best place to network around interests on the Web. So don't give up blogging or move to email lists, Jason. Just move to a better platform. See you in Twine!

By the way, you can respond to this post in Twine, here. (I'm turning off comments on all new articles in this blog. If you want to have a real discussion with me and others, it's easier in Twine, so my discussions will be there from now on.)

And please join the FriendFeed room about Twine if you are there too.

Most of My Blogging is Now in Twine

This is a note to readers of this blog. As many of you know, I'm the CEO of Radar Networks, the makers of a new service called Twine.

Twine is a service for "interest networking," which I believe is the next evolution of social media.

How are social networks and interest networks different?

• Social networks are about connecting to people and messaging with them -- they are basically the next evolution of contact management and email.
• Interest networks are about leveraging collective intelligence to discover and share great content around your interests -- they are the next evolution of social media (discussion forums, wikis, blogs, social news aggregation, and social bookmarking). Interest networks are for making sense of information and discovering new information that matters to you.

I now use Twine as my main place for authoring and sharing content on the Web. (I also use Twine as my main place for keeping up with my many interests. The Twine community does a great job of scouring the Web to find the content that I want to know about. Generally if there is an article that matters to me, it shows up in Twine very quickly. I no longer have to read as many RSS feeds. This is the power of collective intelligence at its best.)

However, although Twine can be used both to author and discover content around interest, in this article I will focus on the authoring side of the story.

Of course I am biased, but speaking from the perspective of a blogger, I can say that Twine is rapidly becoming the personal publishing environment I always dreamed of having. It's an ideal environment to author content and distribute it to highly relevant audiences.

In Twine, I have many different public and private microblogs on various topics that matter to me, and I also participate in microblogs that others have created. It's super easy to post to one or many of them at once.

Twine also has good support for discussions. It's very easy to have discussions around any piece of content -- and the discussions simply work better than they do in my Typepad blog. And of course, Twine has cool features such as automatic semantic tagging of all my posts, great content management features for finding all the content I have added, and powerful contextual recommendations to other interesting content that are added to my content.

As a result of these benefits, in the last month, I have found that my blogging activity in Twine has become about 100X my blogging activity here in Typepad (no offense to Typepad, by the way -- I really like Typepad too, but as a means of distributing content, it just isn't as useful to me as Twine).

Posting in a traditional blog is a labor intensive process and in the end my post only appears to the readers of one blog. But in Twine it is as easy as bookmarking something, or authoring a note, and then sharing it across a bunch of different communities. And Twine helps me keep track of the discussion around each of my posts as it evolves.

So if you are interested in what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, and what matters to me, you'll find a lot more of that in Twine.

If you are not yet a Twine member already, register and you will be let in very quickly.

Here is where I hang out in Twine:

• Nova Spivack's Public Twine -- This is my blog in Twine, for general posts.
• Web 3.0 - Semantic Web -- This is a twine about, well, what the title says. There are thousands of participants.
• Cool -- This is a twine about unsually cool things. It's the Twine equivalent of Boing Boing. But instead of a small elite group controlling what gets in, the entire community helps.
• News of the Strange -- I admit it, I really like fringe news and odd news stories.
• Science Discoveries -- A twine about emerging discoveries in science.
• Web Industry Trends -- A twine about new ideas and trends in the Web biz.
• And many, many more... You can see them on my Profile in Twine.

And if you want to track all my public posts in Twine, go to my profile and subscribe to my RSS feed in Twine.

Twine is still in invite only beta -- but in the second half of July we will be opening up all the public content in Twine to the open Web. Anyone will be able to read it and we will be letting people in faster as well.

I will still blog here when I have larger articles to share. But on a day-to-day basis, I will be posting a lot more in Twine. Hope to see you there!

(By the way, if you are a member of Twine and you are also finding that Twine is becoming the center of your social media life, feel free to copy and paste this post and adapt it into your own blog)

Watch my Panel with Tim Berners-Lee today Live on the Web

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.

Life in Perpetual Beta: The Film

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 well. Here is a clip about how I view the philosophy of living in Beta. Her film is also in perpetual beta, and you can see the clips from her interviews on her blog as the film evolves. Eventually it will be released through the indie film circuit, and it looks like it will be a cool film. By the way, she is open to getting sponsors so if you like this idea and want your brand on the opening credits, drop her a line!

Peace in the Middle East: Could Alternative Energy Be the Solution?

I have been thinking about the situation in the Middle East and also the rise of oil prices, peak oil, and the problem of a world economy based on energy scarcity rather than abundance. There is, I believe, a way to solve the problems in the Middle East, and the energy problems facing the world, at the same time. But it requires thinking "outside the box."

Middle Eastern nations must take the lead in freeing the world from dependence on their oil. This is not only their best strategy for the future of their nations and their people, but also it is what will ultimately be best for the region and the whole world.

It is inevitable that someone is going to invent a new technology that frees the world from dependence on fossil fuels. When that happens all oil empires will suddenly collapse. Far-sighted, visionary leaders in oil-producing nations must ensure that their nations are in position to lead the coming non-fossil-fuel energy revolution. This is the wisdom of "cannibalize yourself before someone else does."

Middle Eastern nations should invest more heavily than any other nations in inventing and supplying new alternative energy technologies. For example: hydrogen, solar, biofuels, zero point energy, magnetic power, and the many new emerging alternatives to fossil fuels. This is a huge opportunity for the Middle East not only for economic reasons, but also because it may just be the key to bringing about long-term sustainable peace in the region.

There is a finite supply of oil in the Middle East -- the game will and must eventually end. Are Middle Eastern nations thinking far enough ahead about this or not? There is a tremendous opportunity for them if they can take the initiative on this front and there is an equally tremendous risk if they do not. If they do not have a major stake in whatever comes after fossil fuels, they will be left with nothing when whatever is next inevitably happens (which might be very soon).

Any Middle Eastern leader who is not thinking very seriously about this issue right now is selling their people short. I sincerely advise them to make this a major focus going forward. Not only will this help them to improve quality of life for their people now and in the future, but it is the best way to help bring about world peace. The Middle East has the potential to lead a huge and lucrative global energy Renaissance. All it takes is vision and courage to push the frontier and to think outside of the box.

Video of my Presentation at The Next Web 2008 Conference

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!

Solving the Landmine and Cluster Bomb Problem

For decades the world has struggled with what to do about unexploded land mines and cluster bombs killing innocent civilians, even years after a conflict has ended. The problem is that a significant percentage (10% - 40% in the case of cluster bombs) of these weapons do not explode when they are deployed, and instead blow up later on when they are disturbed by a person or animal. They also result in creating dead-zones that cannot be used for other purposes after a conflict because of the risk of unexploded ordinance.

Various treaties and proposals have been floated to ban these weapons, but they are not going to go away that easily. First of all, leading nations such as the USA, Russia and China (which also lead the production and sale of these weapons), refuse to participate in these treaties, and secondly, even if they do these weapons will still probably be used by outlaw nations.

While trying to get everyone to agree not to use these weapons is a noble goal, it is not very realistic. The genie is already out of the bottle. Putting it back in is very hard.

Instead, there is a more practical solution to this problem: Timed Deactivation. The basic idea is to redesign these weapons systems such that they simply cannot explode after a set period of time unless they are manually reset. A simple way to achieve this is to design them such that a crucial part of the weapon corrodes with exposure to naturally present environmental air or water over time. Or alternatively there can be a mechanical switch or even a battery powered timer.  In either case, after a set period of time (1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, for example) the device simply decays and can no longer explode without a replacement part. In the best case, after an even longer period of time the explosives in the device should decay and be unusable, even with a replacement part.

Designing these weapons to self-destruct safely is a practical measure that should be part of the solution. Nations that refuse to agree not to use such weapons should at least be able to commit to designing them to deactivate automatically in this manner.

Tagging and the Semantic Web: Tags as Objects

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.

Big Medical News: Use of Cellphones While Pregnant Risks Damage to Baby

A new study has found that using a cell phone 2 or 3 times a day while pregnant is potentially harmful to future child development. The risk level is on par with that of alchohol and tobacco.

Scientists found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioural problems and that the likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation

Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.

A giant study, which surveyed more than 13,000 children, found that using the handsets just two or three times a day was enough to raise the risk of their babies developing hyperactivity and difficulties with conduct, emotions and relationships by the time they reached school age. And it adds that the likelihood is even greater if the children themselves used the phones before the age of seven.

The results of the study, the first of its kind, have taken the top scientists who conducted it by surprise. But they follow warnings against both pregnant women and children using mobiles by the official Russian radiation watchdog body, which believes that the peril they pose "is not much lower than the risk to children's health from tobacco or alcohol".

The research – at the universities of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Aarhus, Denmark – is to be published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology and will carry particular weight because one of its authors has been sceptical that mobile phones pose a risk to health.

If Social Networks Were Like Cars...

I have been thinking a lot about social networks lately, and why there are so many of them, and what will happen in that space.

Today I had what I think is a "big realization" about this.

Everyone, including myself, seems to think that there is only room for one big social network, and it looks like Facebook is winning that race. But what if that assumption is simply wrong from the start?

What if social networks are more like automobile brands? In other words, there can, will and should be many competing brands in the space?

Social networks no longer compete on terms of who has what members. All my friends are in pretty much every major social network.

I also don't need more than one social network, for the same reason -- my friends are all in all of them. How many different ways do I need to reach the same set of people? I only need one.

But the Big Realization is that no social network satisfies all types of users. Some people are more at home in a place like LinkedIn than they are in Facebook, for example. Others prefer MySpace.  There are always going to be different social networks catering to the common types of people (different age groups, different personalities, different industries, different lifestyles, etc.).

The Big Realization implies that all the social networks are going to be able to interoperate eventually, just like almost all email clients and servers do today. Email didn't begin this way. There were different networks, different servers and different clients, and they didn't all speak to each other. To communicate with certain people you had to use a certain email network, and/or a certain email program. Today almost all email systems interoperate directly or at least indirectly. The same thing is going to happen in the social networking space.

Today we see the first signs of this interoperability emerging as social networks open their APIs and enable increasing integration. Currently there is a competition going on to see which "open" social network can get the most people and sites to use it. But this is an illusion. It doesn't matter who is dominant, there are always going to be alternative social networks, and the pressure to interoperate will grow until it happens. It is only a matter of time before they connect together.

I think this should be the greatest fear at companies like Facebook. For when it inevitably happens they will be on a level playing field competing for members with a lot of other companies large and small. Today Facebook and Google's scale are advantages, but in a world of interoperability they may actually be disadvantages -- they cannot adapt, change or innovate as fast as smaller, nimbler startups.

Thinking of social networks as if they were automotive brands also reveals interesting business opportunities. There are still several unowned opportunities in the space.

Myspace is like the car you have in high school. Probably not very expensive, probably used, probably a bit clunky. It's fine if you are a kid driving around your hometown.

Facebook is more like the car you have in college. It has a lot of your junk in it, it is probably still not cutting edge, but its cooler and more powerful.

LinkedIn kind of feels like a commuter car to me. It's just for business, not for pleasure or entertainment.

So who owns the "adult luxury sedan" category? Which one is the BMW of social networks?

Who owns the sportscar category? Which one is the Ferrari of social networks?

Who owns the entry-level commuter car category?

Who owns equivalent of the "family stationwagon or minivan" category?

Who owns the SUV and offroad category?

You see my point. There are a number of big segments that are not owned yet, and it is really unlikely that any one company can win them all.

If all social networks are converging on the same set of features, then eventually they will be close to equal in function. The only way to differentiate them will be in terms of the brands they build and the audience segments they focus on. These in turn will cause them to emphasize certain features more than others.

In the future the question for consumers will be "Which social network is most like me? Which social network is the place for me to base my online presence?"

Sue may connect to Bob who is in a different social network -- his account is hosted in a different social network. Sue will not be a member of Bob's service, and Bob will not be a member of Sue's, yet they will be able to form a social relationship and communication channel. This is like email. I may use Outlook and you may use Gmail, but we can still send messages to each other.

Although all social networks will interoperate eventually, depending on each person's unique identity they may choose to be based in -- to live and surf in -- a particular social network that expresses their identity, and caters to it. For example, I would probably want to be surfing in the luxury SUV of social networks at this point in my life, not in the luxury sedan, not the racecar, not in the family car, not the dune-buggy. Someone else might much prefer an open source, home-built social network account running on a server they host. It shouldn't matter -- we should still be able to connect, share stuff, get notified of each other's posts, etc. It should feel like we are in a unified social networking fabric, even though our accounts live in different services with different brands, different interfaces, and different features.

I think this is where social networks are heading. If it's true then there are still many big business opportunities in this space.

On the Difference Between "Semantic" and "Semantic Web"

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 Web" anyway?

It's pretty simple actually. Any app that can understand language to some degree could be labeled as "semantic." So even Google is somewhat of a semantic application by that criterion. Of course some applications are a lot more semantic than others. Powerset is more semantic than Google, for example, because it understands natural language, not just keywords.

But for an application to be considered part of the "Semantic Web" it has to support a set of open standards defined by the W3C, including at the very least RDF, and potentially also OWL and SPARQL. These are the technologies that collectively comprise the Semantic Web. Supporting these technologies means making at least some RDF data visible to outside applications.

I'm not sure if Powerset is doing this yet, nor whether Freebase is doing it yet, but they should (and I'm guessing they will). Twine, my company's application, is using RDF and OWL internally within our app and we are also exposing this via our site (although we are still in private beta so only beta participants can see that data today). Other companies such as Digg are already making their RDF data visible to the public. Any application with at least publishes RDF data can be considered to be both semantic and part of the Semantic Web.

Associative Search and the Semantic Web: The Next Step Beyond Natural Language Search

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 networks, they sense when networks intersect, and that is how we find things. I call this associative search, because we search along networks of associations between things.

Human memory -- in other words, human search -- is associative. It works by "homing in" on what we are looking for, rather than finding exact matches. Compare this to the the keyword search that is so popular on the Web today and there are obvious differences. Keyword searching provides a very weak form of "homing in" -- by choosing our keywords carefully we can limit the set of things which match. But the problem is we can only find things which contain those literal keywords.

There is no actual use of associations in keyword search, it is just literal matching to keywords. Our brains on the other hand use a much more sophisticated form of "homing in" on answers. Instead of literal matches, our brains look for things things which are associatively connected to things we remember, in order to find what we are ultimately looking for.

For example, consider the case where you cannot remember someone's name. How do you remember it? Usually we start by trying to remember various facts about that person. By doing this our brains then start networking from those facts to other facts and finally to other memories that they intersect.  Ultimately through this process of "free association" or "associative memory" we home in on things which eventually trigger a memory of the person's name.

Both forms of search make use of the intersections of sets, but the associative search model is exponentially more powerful because for every additional search term in your query, an entire network of concepts, and relationships between them, is implied. One additional term can result in an entire network of related queries, and when you begin to intersect the different networks that result from multiple terms in the query, you quickly home in on only those results that make sense. In keyword search on the other hand, each additional search term only provides a linear benefit -- there is no exponential amplification using networks.

Keyword search is a very weak approximation of associative search because there really is no concept of a relationship at all. By entering keywords into a search engine like Google we are simulating an associative search, but without the real power of actual relationships between things to help us. Google does not know how various concepts are related and it doesn't take that into account when helping us find things. Instead, Google just looks for documents that contain exact matches to the terms we are looking for and weights them statistically. It makes some use of relationships between Web pages to rank the results, but it does not actually search along relationships to find new results.

Basically the problem today is that Google does not work the way our brains think. This difference creates an inefficiency for searchers: We have to do the work of translating our associative way of thinking into "keywordese" that is likely to return results we want. Often this requires a bit of trial and error and reiteration of our searches before we get result sets that match our needs.

A recently proposed solution to the problem of "keywordese" is natural language search (or NLP search), such as what is being proposed by companies like Powerset and Hakia. Natural language search engines are slightly closer to the way we actually think because they at least attempt to understand ordinary language instead of requiring keywords. You can ask a question and get answers to that question that make sense.

Natural language search engines are able to understand the language of a query and the language in the result documents in order to make a better match between the question and potential answers. But this is still not true associative search. Although these systems bear a closer resemblance to the way we think, they still do not actually leverage the power of networks -- they are still not as powerful as associative search.

Video of my Talk at Digital Now

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.

Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote

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 buy it to have on your shelf. It's a big volume and worth the read):

 

The Wikipedia, Knowledge Preservation and DNA

I had an interesting thought today about the long-term preservation and transmission of human knowledge.

The Wikipedia may be on its way to becoming the one of the best places in which to preserve knowledge for future generations. But this is just the beginning. What if we could encode the Wikipedia into the Junk DNA portion of our own genome? It appears that something like this may actually be possible -- at least according some recent studies of the non-coding regions of the human genome.

If we could actually encode knowledge, like the Wikipedia for example, into our genome, the next logical step would be to find a way to access it directly.

At first we might only be able to access and read the knowledge stored in our DNA through a computationally intensive genetic analysis of an individual's DNA. In order to correct any errors in the data from mutuation, we would also need to cross-reference this individual data with similar analyses from the DNA of other people who also carry this data in their DNA. But this is just the beginning. There are however ways to stored data such that there is enough redundancy to protect against degradation. Assuming we could do this we might be able to eliminate the need for cross referencing as a form of error correction -- the data itself would be self-correcting so to speak. If we could accomplish this then the next step would be to find a way for an individual to access the knowledge stored in their DNA in real-time, directly. That's a long way off but there may be a way to do this using some future nano-scale genomic-brain interface. This opens up some fascinating areas of speculation to say the least.

 

 

Great Article about Benefits of Twine from a Beta User

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.

Cool Twine Fan Video by a High-School Student

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.

A Few Predictions for the Near Future

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.