Minding the Planet

Web 3.0 Roundup: Radar Networks, Powerset, Metaweb and Others...

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 in this area in the last year, including Radar Networks and other companies.

Clearly the "semantic" sector is starting to heat up. As a result, I've been getting a lot of questions from reporters and VC's about how what we are doing compares to other companies such as for example, Powerset, Textdigger, and Metaweb. There was even a rumor that we had already closed our series B round! (That rumor is not true; in fact the round hasn't started yet, although I am getting very strong VC interest and we will start the round pretty soon).

In light of all this I thought it might be helpful to clarify what we are doing, how we understand what other leading players in this space are doing, and how we look at this sector.

Indexing the Decades of the Web

First of all, before we get started, there is one thing to clear up. The Semantic Web is part of what is being called "Web 3.0" by some, but it is in my opinion really just one of several converging technologies and trends that will define this coming era of the Web. I've written here about a proposed definition of Web 3.0, in more detail.

For those of you who don't like terms like Web 2.0, and Web 3.0, I also want to mention that  I agree --- we all want to avoid a rapid series of such labels or an arms-race of companies claiming to be > x.0. So I have a practical proposal: Let's use these terms to index decades since the Web began. This is objective -- we can all agree on when decades begin and end, and if we look at history each decade is characterized by various trends. 

I think this is reasonable proposal and actually useful (and also avoids endless new x.0's being announced every year). Web 1.0 was therefore the first decade of the Web: 1990 - 2000. Web 2.0 is the second decade, 2000 - 2010. Web 3.0 is the coming third decade, 2010 - 2020 and so on. Each of these decades is (or will be) characterized by particular technology movements, themes and trends, and these indices, 1.0, 2.0, etc. are just a convenient way of referencing them. This is a useful way to discuss history, and it's not without precedent. For example, various dynasties and historical periods are also given names and this provides shorthand way of referring to those periods and their unique flavors. To see my timeline of these decades, click here.

So with that said, what is Radar Networks actually working on? First of all, Radar Networks is still in stealth, although we are planning to go beta in 2007. Until we get closer to launch what I can say without an NDA is still limited. But at least I can give some helpful hints for those who are interested. This article provides some hints, as well as what I hope is a helpful tutorial about natural language search and the Semantic Web, and how they differ. I'll also discuss how Radar Networks compares some of the key startup ventures working with semantics in various ways today (there are many other companies in this sector -- if you know of any interesting ones, please let me know in the comments; I'm starting to compile a list).

 

(click the link below to keep reading the rest of this article...)

How the WebOS Evolves?

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 current thinking here at Radar Networks about where the Web (and we) are heading. It shows a timeline of technology leading from the prehistoric desktop era to the possible future of the WebOS...

Note that as well as mapping a possible future of the Web, here I am also proposing that the Web x.0 terminology be used to index the decades of the Web since 1990. Thus we are now in the tail end of Web 2.0 and are starting to lay the groundwork for Web 3.0, which fully arrives in 2010.

This makes sense to me. Web 2.0 was really about upgrading the "front-end" and user-experience of the Web. Much of the innovation taking place today is about starting to upgrade the "backend" of the Web and I think that will be the focus of Web 3.0 (the front-end will probably not be that different from Web 2.0, but the underlying technologies will advance significantly enabling new capabilities and features).

See also: This article I wrote redefining what the term "Web 3.0" means.

See also: A Visual Graph of the Future of Productivity

Please note: This is a work in progress and is not perfect yet. I've been tweaking the positions to get the technologies and dates right. Part of the challenge is fitting the text into the available spaces. If anyone out there has suggestions regarding where I've placed things on the timeline, or if I've left anything out that should be there, please let me know in the comments on this post and I'll try to readjust and update the image from time to time. If you would like to produce a better version of this image, please do so and send it to me for inclusion here, with the same Creative Commons license, ideally.

I'm Going to Start Blogging About Radar Networks Here

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.

Unlike some companies which have done massive and deliberate hype about unreleased vapor software, we really felt it would be better to just focus on our work and let it speak for itself when we release it.

The fact is we have been working quietly for several years on something really big, and really hard. It hasn't always been easy -- there have been some  technical challenges that took a long time to overcome. And it took us a long time to find VC's daring enough to back us.

The thing is, what we are making is not a typical Web 2.0 "build it and flip it in 6 months" kind of project. It's deep technology that has long-term infrastructure-level implications for the Web and the future of content. And until recently we really didn't even have a good way to describe it to non-techies. So we just focused on our work and figured we would talk about it someday in the future.

But perhaps I've erred on the side of caution -- being so averse to gratuitous hype that I have literally said almost nothing publicly about the company. We didn't even issue a press release about our Series A round (which happened last April -- I'll be adding one to our new corporate site, which launches on Sunday night however, for historical purposes), and until today, our site at Radar has been  just a one-page placeholder with no info at all about what we are doing.

But something happened that changed my mind about this recently. I had lunch with my friend Munjal Shah, the CEO of Riya, who has an investor, Peter Rip, in common with me. Listening to Munjal tell his stories about how he has blogged so openly about Riya's growth, even from way before their launch, and how that has provided him and his team with amazingly valuable community feedback, support, critiques, and new ideas, really got me thinking. Maybe it's time Radar Networks started telling a little more of its story? It seems like the team at Riya really benefitted from being so open. So although, we're still in stealth-mode and there are limits to what we can say at this point, I do think there are some aspects we can start to talk about, even before we've launched. And besides that our story itself is interesting -- it's the story of what it's like to build and work in a deep-technology play in today's venture economy.

So that's what I'm going to start doing here -- I'm going to start telling our story on this blog, Minding the Planet. I already have around 500 regular readers, and most of them are scientists and hard-core techies and entrepreneurs. I've been writing mainly about emerging technologies that are interesting enough to inspire me to post about them, and once in a while about ideas I have been thinking about. These are also subjects that are of interest to the people who read this blog. But now I'm also going to start blogging more about Radar Networks and what we are doing and how it's going. I'll post about our progress, the questions we have, the achievements on our team, and of course news about our launch plans. And I hope to hear from people out there who are interested in joining us when we do our private invite-only beta tests.

We're still quite a ways from a public launch, but we do have something working in the lab and it's very exciting. Our VC's want us to launch it now, but it's still an early alpha and we think it needs a lot more work (and testing) before our baby is ready to step out into the big world out there. But it looks promising. I do think, all modesty aside for a moment, that it has the potential to really advance the Web on a broad scale. And it's exciting to work on.

This post is already long enough, so I'll finish here for the moment. In my upcoming posts I will start to talk a little bit more about the new category that Radar Networks is going to define, and some of the technologies we're using, and challenges we've overcome along the way. And I'll share some insights, and stories, and successes we've had.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and besides that, my dinner's ready. More later.

Video Explains Semantic Web + A Comment

Ben Hammersly has come out with a video of his talk explaining the Semantic Web for beginners. It's a great resource to explain what the Semantic Web is all about for people who are new to the subject or simply interested in the underlying technology of RDF, the concept of triples, etc. It is also unique because Ben's video appears in the upper left corner of his presentation, synched to his slides -- now that is really cool! What a great idea!

Now my reaction to this presentation is that Ben makes many good points, but he says the only remaining big problems of the Semantic Web are "getting people to make data" and the "user-interface" for search and what he calls "compound queries" -- what I call "semantic queries" (and what have been called "multifaceted navigation" by library scientists for a long-time). However, I think there is another unsolved problem -- one that is equally important to adoption of the Semantic Web, what I call "The Ontology Problem." See my next post for more on this...

Current State of the Weblog Tools Market

This article provides a good overview of the Weblog tools market, products, and market share.

GoMeme 2.0 - Help Test This Meme

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. This is the second generation meme in our experiment in spreading ideas. To find out what a GoMeme is, and how this experiment works, or just to see how this GoMeme is growing and discuss it with others, visit the Root Posting and FAQ for this GoMeme at www.mindingtheplanet.net .

FAQ for GoMeme 2.0

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 to your Website is located, here. Before you do this, please read this FAQ so you know how it works.

GoMeme 1.0 -- Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

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."

New Version of My "Metaweb" Graph -- The Future of the Net

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 a Web focused on relationships between things --- what I call "The Relationship Web" or the "Relationship Revolution."

We see early signs of this shift to a Web of relationships in the sudden growth of social networking systems. As the semantics of these relationships continue to evolve the richness of the "arcs" will begin to rival that of the "nodes" that make up the network.

This is similar to the human brain -- individual neurons are not particularly important or effective on their own, rather it is the vast networks of relationships that connect them that encode knowledge and ultimately enable intelligence. And like the human brain, in the future Metaweb, technologies will emerge to enable the equivalent of "spreading activation" to propagate across the network of nodes and arcs. This will provide a means of automatically growing links, weighting links, making recommendations, and learning across distributed graphs of nodes and links. This may resemble a sort of "Hebbian learning" across the link structure of the network -- enhancing the strength of frequently used connections and dampening less used links, and even growing new transitive links when appropriate.

As the intelligence with which such processes unfolds, in a totally decentralized and grassroots manner, we will begin to see signs of emergent "transhuman" intelligences on the network. Web services are the beginning of this -- but imagine if they were connected to autonomous intelligent agents, roaming the network and able to interact with one another, Web sites, and even people. These next-layer intelligences will begin to function as brokers, associators, editors, publishers, recommenders, advertisers, researchers, defenders, buyers, sellers, monitors, aggregators, distributors, integrators, translators, and also as knowledge-stewards responsible for constantly improving the structure and quality of subsets of the Web that they oversee. And while many of these agents will be able to interact intelligently with humans, not all of them will -- most will probably just have interfaces for interacting with other agents.

Vast systems of "hybrid intelligence" (humans + intelligent software) will form -- for example, next-generation communities that intelligently self-organize around emerging topics and trends, smart marketplaces that self-optimize to reduce the cost of transactions for their participants, 'group minds' and 'enterprise minds' that embody and manage the collective cognitiion of teams and organizations, and knowledge networks that function to enable distributed collective intelligence among networks of indivdiuals, across communities and business-relationships.

As the network becomes increasingly autonomous and self-organizing we may say that the network-as-a-whole is becoming "intelligent." But it will be several steps beyond that before it finally "wakes up" -- when the various processes of the network reach that point at which the entire system truly functions as a coordinated, self-aware intelligence. This will require the formation of many higher layers of intelligence -- leading to something that functions like the cerebral cortex in humans. It will also require something that functions as its virtual "self-awareness" -- an internal process of meta-level self-representation, self-projection, self-feedback, self-analysis and self-improvement within the network. For a map of how this may actually unfold over time we might look at the evolutionary history of nervous systems on Earth.

As structures that provide virtual higher-order cognition and self-awareness to the network emerge, connect to one another, and gain sophistication, the Global Brain will self-organize into a Global Mind -- the intelligence of the whole will begin to outpace the intelligence of any of its parts and thus it will cross the threshold from being just a "bunch of interacting parts" to "a new higher-order whole" in its own right -- a global intelligent Metaweb for our planet.

As I predicted .. Lifelogs are coming...

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 parts of it private! I would like my camera phone to take a photo every minute and add it to my Lifelog automatically. Then I can speed through it flip-book-animation style to get to a section I am interested in. Next would be to add a digital streaming voice recorder to my phone and record whatever is being said on every phone call, and even when I am not on a call at 1 minute intervals. Using voiceprints and speech-to-text we can then index who was speaking and what was said as a way to search and navigate the Lifelog -- for example, this would make it possible to find all photos that correspond to times when Sue was speaking about "Internet." With a little more work we could link this to additional semantics and make it really searchable.