Minding the Planet

Burma Update: Protestors Cremated Alive; Monks Massacred in Jungle

The situation in Burma is far worse than the mainstream media has reported so far. Watch this video that was just smuggled out showing soldiers beating unarmed protesters. There are now reports coming in from eyewitnesses of young school students being shot by the army, masses of injured protestors being cremated alive, and thousands of monks and other protesters being killed and dumped in mass graves in the jungles. The junta has now imprisoned thousands of monks and plans to "send them away." The Burmese military junta is known for torture, summary executions, and is listed with Somalia as one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. This is essentially a form of genocide or state-sponsored terrorism -- in this case by a regime against its own people. Help get the word out. Sign this petition. This has to be stopped. The Burmese people are helpless and need protection from the world community.

Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

Another article of note on the subject of our evolving digital lives and what user-experience designers should be thinking about:

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not.

(snip...)

In the coming years, our ability to interact with the information we’re so rapidly generating will determine how successfully we can manage our digital lives. There is a great challenge at our doorsteps—a shift in the way we live with each other.

As designers of user experiences for digital products and services, we can make people’s digital lives more meaningful and less confusing. It is our responsibility to envision not only techniques for sorting, ordering, and navigating these digital information spaces, but also to devise methods of helping people feel comfortable with such interactions. To better understand and ultimately solve this information management problem, we should take a holistic view of the digital person. While our data might be scattered, people need to feel whole.

'Bemes' are Defining the Blogosphere

Tom Hayes has an interesting post in which he coins the word 'beme" to mean a meme that spreads in the blogosphere.

Michael Malone's ABC News column on Thursday mentioning "bemes" has certainly produced a lot of interest.  Originally, I coined the word beme to describe a meme propagated by blogs and bloggers.  Now I can see that the turn of phrase has a much bigger potential to capture the rapidly-moving cultural touchstones of the Bubble Generation.

As you may know, "meme" was first defined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 as "a unit of cultural information" spread from one mind to another. In other words, a viral idea that eventually becomes common knowledge.

Fast forward three decades, and it seems to me that technology has turbo-charged the meme process.  Looking for the juste mot to describe a "purposeful" meme fed into the vast human network of the Internet, either by blog, email, video, phonecast, social media or other viral means, beme seems to fit the bill. 

A beme is a turbo-charged meme made possible entirely by the existence of the network affect.  A beme can be impactful because it is lurid--a photo of a panty-less Britney Spears, or humorous--a whimisical video of the band OKGO on treadmills, or gut-wrenching--the sad tirade by comedian Michael Richards.  A beme can cement an idea with the public in a way that cannot be legislated or regulated.  No legal effort by Cisco to enforce a trademark, for example, will make the public unlearn that Apple produces the iPhone.

• A meme is old media, a beme is new media.
• A meme takes off by accident, a beme by design.
• A meme can take years to surface, a beme hours.

Venice Project Making Heavy Use of RDF

I just found out from Pete, that the Venice Project is making really heavy use of RDF. Very interesting. Another major proof point. It's looking like 2007 is going to be the year of mainstream RDF applications. It sounds like there are some similarities between what the Venice Project is making, on a platform level, and what we've already built on a platform level. Of course the application they are making (video syndication, as I understand it) and the application we are making (not video; not announced yet) are completely different.

What is the Semantic Web, Actually?

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 be one Semantic Web, there will be thousands or even millions of them, each in their own area. They will all be part of one Semantic Web in that they will use the same open-standard languages and their data will be universally accessible, but they won't all be run by any single company. They will connect together over time, forming a tapestry. But nobody will own this or run this as a single service. It will be just as decentralized as the Web already is.
• The Semantic Web is not separate from the existing Web. The Semantic Web won't be a new Web apart from the Web we already have. It simply adds new metadata and data to the existing Web. It merges right into the existing HTML Web just like XML does, except this new metadata is in RDF (since RDF can in fact be expressed in XML).
  
• The Semantic Web is not just about unstructured data. In fact, the Semantic Web is really about structured data: it provides a means (RDF) to turn any content or data into structured data that other software can make use of. This is really what RDF enables.
• The Semantic Web does not require complex ontologies. Even without making use of OWL and more sophisticated ontologies, powerful data-sharing and data-integration can be enabled on the existing Web using even just RDF alone.
• The Semantic Web does not only exist on Web pages. RDF works inside of applications and databases, not just on Web pages. Calling it a "Web" is a misnomer of sorts -- it's not just about the Web, it's about all information, data and applications.
• The Semantic Web is not only about AI, and doesn't require it. There are huge benefits from the Semantic Web without ever using a single line of artificial intelligence code. While the next-generation of AI will certainly be enabled by richer semantics, AI is not the only benefit of RDF. Making data available in RDF makes it more accessible, integratable, and reusable -- regardless of any AI. The long-term future of the Semantic Web is AI for sure -- but to get immediate benefits from RDF no AI is necessary.
• The Semantic Web is not only about mining, search engines and spidering. Application developers and content providers, and end-users, can benefit from using the Semantic Web (RDF) within their own services, regardless of whether they expose that RDF metadata to outside parties. RDF is useful without doing any data-mining -- it can be baked right into content within authoring tools and created transparently when information is published. RDF makes content more manageable and frees developers and content providers from having to look at relational data models. It also gives end-users better ways to collect and manage content they find.
• The Semantic Web is not just research. It's already in use and starting to reach the market. The government uses it of course. But also so do companies like Adobe, and more recently Yahoo (Yahoo Food has started to use some Semantic Web technologies now). And one flavor of RSS is defined with RDF. Oracle has released native RDF support in their products. The list goes on...

Learning more:

• To learn about the technology of RDF, I recommend this terrific presentation by my friend Ian Davis.
• This is my long-term outlook for the Web and the Semantic Web.
• PlanetRDF is a good feed to read if you want to keep up with what's going on in this field.
• My own company, Radar Networks, is working on bringing the Semantic Web to the masses. You can sign up for our launch list at our site to be notified of future announcements.

Excellent Feedback from Om Malik

Today A-List blogger and emerging "media 2.0" mogul, Om Malik, dropped by our offices to get a confidential demo of what we are building. We've asked Om to keep a tight lid on what we showed him, but he may be releasing at least a few hints in the near future.

Om was there in the early days of the Web and really understands the industry and the content ecosystem. I remember running into him in NYC when I was a co-founder of EarthWeb. He's seen a lot of technologies come and go, and he has a huge knowledgebase in his head. So he was an excellent person to speak to about what we are doing.

He gave us some of the most useful user-feedback about our product that we've ever gotten. One of our target audiences is content creators, and what Om is building over at Gigaom is a perfect example. He is a hard-core content creator. So he really understands deeply the market pain that we are addressing. And he had some incredibly useful comments, tweaks and suggestions for us. During the meeting there were quite a few Aha's for me personally -- Several new angles and benefits of our product. Meeting with folks like Om, who represent potential users of what we are building, is really helpful to us in understanding what the needs and preferences of content creators are today. I'm really excited to start doing some design around some of the suggestions he made.

Of course, the needs of content providers are only one half of the equation. We're also addressing the needs of content consumers with our product. In order to really solve the problems facing content creators we also have to address the problems faced by their readers. It's a full ecosystem, a virtuous cycle -- a whole new dimension of the Web.

Radar Networks is Seeking Search Engineers for Large-Scale Web Mining Initiative

My company, Radar Networks, is building a very large dataset by crawling and mining the Web. We then apply a range of new algorithms to the data (part of our secret sauce) to generate some very interesting and useful new information about the Web. We are looking for a few experienced search engineers to join our team -- specifically people with hands-on experience designing and building large-scale, high-performance Web crawling and text-mining systems. If you are interested, or you know anyone who is interested or might be qualified for this, please send them our way. This is your chance to help architect and build a really large and potentially important new system. You can read more specifics abour our open jobs here.

The Future of the Web is Semantic

Here is a good article from IBM that provides decent, not-overly-technical, overview of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web, and the value they offer.

A Cool Thingy...

This is cool Click to see why.  I think this idea has great value for viral, meme-based Web advertising. Just imagine: Advertisers could release really cool animations to add to sites, and site owners could add them into their sites for entertainment or humor. The animations could run ads within them as well. It's fun. Everyone wins, everyone's happy. And of course users can aim these animations at any other site so visitors who like it can spread it to their own sites. Very smart!!! Very Web 2.0.

Radar Networks News...

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.