Minding the Planet

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)

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. 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.

Taming RSS

Tristan posted a nice article about better ways to manage RSS today (reproduced here with his exact wording, typos and all, since my policy is not to edit other people's words)...

2004 is obviously the year of RSS, with article popping up left and right in mainstream publications. However, RSS can also be a source of much stress, if you subscribe to too much.

A few weeks ago, my list of subscribed feeds went over 300. That was the beginning of a sobbering experiment. While it is technically possible to follow 300 siets via RSS, it's not for the faint-hearted. I've since been prunning the list a little as it became more and more time consuming to go through all the entries. While I felt like I must be failing somehow, Sebastien Paquet pointed out that the median number of subscriptions people have is under 100.

I suspect this is where the power laws actually become useful. Because some blogs are disproportionally read, they can be seen as flag-bearers in the blogosphere. Because they are so powerful, they can easily shape opinions in the blog world. And because they do so, one can limit the number of blogs they read in order to get an idea as to consensus among blogsters. This is great in that those powerful bloggers become editors of sorts.

There is, however, a problem with that. As recently reported in a Wired News story, the most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas. This means that the power laws succeed in a mainstreaming of ideas but fails in terms of coming up with new ones. This, unfortunately, means that there is a bit of a pack mentality among power bloggers which can only be counter-balanced by reading blogs that are not as popular.

But blogs represent only part of the RSS world. If one adds news sources from mainstream publications, one gets a fuller picture of a subject, mixing expert opinion (from the bloggers) which general overviews (from the media). From this mix, one can get a fuller picture. What we now need is a tool that would create something akin to a self-organizing system within the RSS world. Tools like Blogdex provide an idea as to what's popular right now; Tools like Feedster give search capabilities; and tools like Share your OPML provide data as to what people subscribe to.

The next step is finding a merger of those three categories, along with some better tracking mechanism as to what is actually read and what links are followed vs. what is subscribed to. If, based on the stuff I read (and not necessarily the stuff I subscribe to), I could get some changes in behavior in my aggregator (as in "the following articles in feeds you subscribe to are seen as important by other people who read similar stuff and are related to categories you are interested in"), I might be able to tame the flow of information I get. Think of it as the equivalent of the karma system on slashdot. This would give me an idea as to what is popular and of interest to me.

The next step would be to also provide a serendipity factor. Ideas that are out on their own should have their own basket. If a particular site is a good source of original content, then that source should move up in my personal ranking if I am subscribed to it.

Of course, the classification provided in RSS 2.0 and in OPML also needs to be considered as part of this. If there was a way to sort feeds by categories (and identify categories based on how people classified things in their OPML file), it would make things easier. For example, I classify some feeds in the Gear category but others might classify them in the Gadgets category. I should be able to then create an associate between those two words so that when I peruse someone's else feed, entries and blogs listed under Gadgets would pop up in my Gear section.

This seems like a lot to code but could truly give some semantic to the web. Already, the world wide web, as it was used pre-RSS is becoming an archival medium and RSS is becoming the updated world (as a side note, this is going to have a huge impact on web-side design and marketing as one has to rethink how to reach reader in a space where all entries look alike).

Read the original article here

An RSS Feed Tool I Would Like

It would be cool if there was a way to automatically make and serve an RSS feed from my daily IE history -- this feed would be a running stream of every URL I look at every day. It would be generated by a little floating utility on my desktop. The utility would allow me to turn URL streaming on and off -- so that if I don't want some URL to go into my feed I can stop that from happening. It might also enable me to add some commentary to each URL in the feed. You people out there in the Metaweb could then subscribe to my feed and see all the interesting stuff I looked at today. It would be even cooler if we all had something like this -- and each of us could view what any of us was viewing. And hey, while we're at it, why not have some compound feeds that are created by merging feeds from various people -- how about a feed that is the set of all URLs looked at today by all my closest friends -- where the rank of a URL in the feed is the number of times it was looked surfed to today by people in that group (i.e. the popularity of that URL). Cool huh?

Blogging by the Numbers

Here are some good stats on the size of the blogosphere.

The Metaweb is Coming... See this Diagram...

This diagram (click to see larger version) illustrates why I believe technology evolution is moving towards what I call the Metaweb. The Metaweb is emerging from the convergence of the Web, Social Software and the Semantic Web.

The Pattern of Social Technology Evolution

Here is my strategic outlook on the evolution of online technologies: past, present and future. Please see the table below. Commentary follows the table...

	Content	Communication	Collaboration	Community	Commerce
1980’s   The Net	Desktop Publishing	Phone, Fax, Email	Database Applications	BBS’s & On-line Services	Phone, Fax, Early EDI
1990’s   The Web	Web Publishing & Web Sites	PIM’s, E-mail & IM, Phone, Fax	Groupware, KM, and Intranets	Web Portals	Web Stores & Marketplaces
2000’s   The Metaweb	Weblogs & RSS   (“Microcontent” and “Personal Publishing”)	E-Mail, Webmail, IM, VOIP, Video Conferencing & Web Conferencing	Wikis, Decentralized Collaboration & Semantic Webs	Social Networks & “Friendsware”	XML Web Services & Web Services Exchanges
2010’s     The Semantic Web	K-logs, Lifelogs & Personal Portals     Microcontent becomes primary enterprise KM medium. All information about a person is stored in their Lifelog. Everyone gets their own personal portal. Semantic routing of content becomes part of network stack.	Unified Communications     Persistent identity and relationship management across all devices, software, and networks enables seamlessly integrated synchronous and asynchronous communications.	Group Minds & Collective Intelligence     Anyone can know what everyone knows; everyone can know what anyone knows. New levels of collective intelligence are enabled by fusion of Semantic Web with distributed agents and knowledge management tools.	Emergent Communities     Communities spontaneously emerge and self-organize around memes (hot topics). Communities are decentralized; no longer “hosted” in any single location or controlled by any single service provider	Intelligent Marketplaces     Intelligent commerce agents interact semi-autonomously in a decentralized global marketplace.Self-optimizing trading networks

What we see is that "Social Networks" are the current-day entrant in the "Community" category. As the 1990's taught us, the Community category did not prove to be a big money-maker -- except for organizations that focused on becoming portals and eventually marketplaces, such as Yahoo!. Organizations that focused primarily on providing online communities became "features" rather than "stand-alone businesses" over time, and were either acquired or went out of business.

Communities can generate revenues from advertising and in some cases, paid subscriptions, however incremental revenue growth was primarily attained through commerce and classified advertising. If Social Networking services are to "make it" as businesses they will have to trend in this direction -- those that do not will go the way of the 1990's-era community sites.

Similarly, companies that sell "Social Networking Software Platforms" are simply the current-day equivalent of companies that sold "Community Platforms" in the 1990's. Those companies morphed into Web conferencing and collaboration companies, or were acquired, or went out of business. The key lesson here is that mere "Community Platform" companies did not become big businesses in their own right -- those that survived had to either verticalize or focus on enterprise collaboration. The same will be true of companies that provide platforms for social networking in the enterprise.

More commentary to come soon...

Semantic Web Officially Approved by W3C

Huge news for the Semantic Web -- the W3C has officially approved the RDF and OWL specs.