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)

Favorite Site of the Week: Slideshare.net

Slideshare is a site where people post and share their Powerpoints. You can watch the powerpoints quickly with a little viewer widget that let's you click through them in your browser. There are some really interesting, creative, and informative presentations there. It's addictive, I've been looking at presentations all morning. Can't stop. (Thanks to Peter Royal for telling me about this).

LOST: My Newest Obsession

I know, I know. I'm several years late to the party on this one, but I have become quite obsessed with the television show, Lost. It's possibly the most addictive show on TV. Ever. You have to start from the beginning though. Sign up for Netflix if you haven't already, and be prepared to not leave your house until you run out of discs to watch...

Pandora is Great But...

The online music recommendation service Pandora is really cool in all ways but one. Due to what they report as a requirement of their music license the user is only allowed to skip a small number of songs per hour. This can be a problem since the whole point of Pandora is that you give it feedback as it plays songs for you and it learns what you like. If you're like me and you rate a bunch of songs and quickly skip ahead to keep rating more of them (while avoiding the songs you don't like), then Pandora's present rule is a bit frustrating. (Note: a workaround was suggested by a reader below -- but it's still kind of a pain.) (Note 2: See the extensive and informative comments added by CTO of Pandora, below, as well).

After you hit your skip-limit you have no choice but to sit through the songs you don't like because you can't skip them. Eventually the count is reset and you can start skipping again. This is an odd limitation and I can't quite understand why it makes sense for Pandora or the music companies -- it would seem that the more music a user listens to and rates the greater the chance they will buy something, which is how both Pandora and the record companies make money. So they should be encouraging all forms of use -- including skipping songs to find other songs you like. At least when users skip songs they still stay in the site -- if they are forced to sit through songs they don't like they are more likely to leave.

If it weren't for this one frustrating limitation I would really use Pandora all the time to discover and buy new music. There is one more feature of Pandora that I would like -- a way to pop the client into a small floating window, or even a desktop client so I don't have to keep my browser sitting there all the time.

I've already used Pandora to discover and buy music -- and I would use it even more if the above issues were solved in later versions. However, even with these limitations it is still one of the best and most enjoyable ways to discover new music that matches your interests. I think the potential of this app (and the Music Genome Project, that it's based on) is huge, and I can't wait for future versions.

The Time Fountain

This is a really cool art and technology project that creates an interactive timekeeping system out of a fountain of falling drops of water and a strobe light. You can interact with the drops. It has to be seen to be explained. Watch the video.

Colored Bubbles

After 11 years of painstaking research and inventor has finally achieved the "holy grail" -- colored soap bubbles that don't stain anything. But that's just the beginning -- his invention is based on a completely new kind of dye chemistry that could open the door to a wide range of new products. Read this excellent article, and also click here to view some pictures of these extraordinarily beautiful new bubbles.

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.

An Incredible Flash Production -- Must See!

I was fortunate enough to wander across this amazing online Flash presentation that reveals the hidden meaning of the film, "2001." It's a thoroughly engaging, brilliantly produced, fascinating production -- one of the best uses of Flash animation that I've ever seen. It also makes some really interesting points about human evolution, our relationship to our tools, and the future. It's a must-see -- takes about 20 minutes to go through it, and well worth it! -- also make sure to answer their little survey at the end for a hint about their next production...

You've Got To Hear This Album...

My friend, Bari Koral, just released her new album, "Confessions of an Indie Girl." Bari is an incredible talent -- and this is her best album yet. She tours most of the year and has a large following, but she is still undiscovered by the mainstream. This review says it all:

"Confessions of an Indiegirl is A CLASSIC.  A sure bet to be one of the biggest releases of 2005.

Feels like it should be a blockbuster hit. Comparisons to such artists as Chrissie Hynde, Lucinda Williams, Norah Jones, Shelby Lynne and Fleetwood Mac, while inevitable, are in no way limiting."

--Al Muzer, The Aquarian

You can read the whole review, listen to clips of every song, and BUY A SIGNED COPY of the record now at: www.cdbaby.com/bari3

I really hope a lot of people hear this album -- it really is a "classic" -- I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

Her website is www.barikoral.com -- a new version of the site will be going up very soon.

Just Saw A Great Film

Today I saw The Motorcycle Diaries. This film is perhaps one of most beautiful, vivid, and emotionally powerful works of art to ever grace the silver screen. I knew nothing about this film before today -- it was a whim, at the suggestion of a very special person. I have seen hundreds of films -- and just about every significant foreign and independent film in the past several decades. This film is truly perfection in motion. It's a must-see.

Disclaimer: In case anyone takes issue with this film, or my review of it, let me just say that I personally know nothing about the life of Che Guevara, and the film does not delve into his politics or his later life as a revolutionary -- which I do not endorse or agree with. The film is really not very poltical in fact -- it is simply a great film about a road trip, the struggle to survive, and the strength of compassion. The cinematography, acting, writing, casting, direction and editing are amazing: That's why I like this film. It is a masterpiece of the medium. The film stands on its own as a great work of art and should be seen for what it is.