Minding the Planet

New Video: Leading Minds from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft talk about their Visions for Future of The Web

Video from my panel at DEMO Fall '08 on the Future of the Web is now available.

I moderated the panel, and our panelists were:

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.

The panel was excellent, with many DEMO attendees saying it was the best panel they had ever seen at DEMO.

Many new and revealing insights were provided by our excellent panelists. I was particularly interested in the different ways that Google and Yahoo describe what they are working on. They covered lots of new and interesting information about their thinking. Howard Bloom added fascinating comments about the big picture and John Udell helped to speak about Microsoft's longer-term views as well.

Enjoy!!!

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)

How about Web 3G?

I'm here at the BlogTalk conference in Cork, Ireland with a range of bloggers and technologists discussing the emerging social Web. Including myself, Ian Davis and Paul Miller from Talis, there are also a bunch of other Semantic Web folks including Dan Brickley, and a group from DERI Galway.

Over dinner a few of us were discussing the terms "Semantic Web" versus "Web 3.0" and we all felt a better term was needed. After some thinking, Ian Davis suggested "Web 3G." I like this term better than Web 3.0 because it loses the "version number" aspect that so many objected to. It has a familiar ring to it as well, reminding me of the 3G wireless phone initiative. It also suggests Tim Berners-Lee's "Giant Global Graph" or GGG -- a synonym for the Semantic Web. Ian stayed up late and put together a nice blog post about the term, echoing many of my own sentiments about how this term should apply to a decade (the third decade of the Web), rather than to a particular technology.

Radar Networks Announces Twine.com

My company, Radar Networks, has just come out of stealth. We've announced what we've been working on all these years: It's called Twine.com. We're going to be showing Twine publicly for the first time at the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow. There's lot's of press coming out where you can read about what we're doing in more detail. The team is extremely psyched and we're all working really hard right now so I'll be brief for now. I'll write a lot more about this later.

Business 2.0 and BusinessWeek Articles About Radar Networks

It's been an interesting month for news about Radar Networks. Two significant articles came out recently:

Business 2.0 Magazine published a feature article about Radar Networks in their July 2007 issue. This article is perhaps the most comprehensive article to-date about what we are working on at Radar Networks, it's also one of the better articulations of the value proposition of the Semantic Web in general. It's a fun read, with gorgeous illustrations, and I highly recommend reading it.

BusinessWeek  posted an article about Radar Networks on the Web. The article covers some of the background that led to my interests in collective intelligence and the creation of the company. It's a good article and covers some of the bigger issues related to the Semantic Web as a paradigm shift. I would add one or two points of clarification in addition to what was stated in the article: Radar Networks is not relying solely on software to organize the Internet -- in fact, the service we will be launching combines human intelligence and machine intelligence to start making sense of information, and helping people search and collaborate around interests more productively. One other minor point related to the article -- it mentions the story of EarthWeb, the Internet company that I co-founded in the early 1990's: EarthWeb's content business actually was sold after the bubble burst, and the remaining lines of business were taken private under the name Dice.com. Dice is the leading job board for techies and was one of our properties. Dice has been highly profitable all along and recently filed for a $100M IPO.

AOL Adds 63 Million Users to OpenID ... Digg Joins Too

The folks at Read/Write Web have a great analysis of AOL's recent move to support the OpenID initiative. AOL has integrated with OpenID, adding 63 million users in a bid to make AIM handles sticky.

Digg also just announced they are joining OpenID.

OpenID is one of the technologies that I am tracking as a key enabler of Web 3.0.

'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.

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.

Minding The Planet -- The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web

NOTES

• Master Copy can be found at this URL or http://tinyurl.com/yynb93
• Last Update: Tuesday, November 7, 2006, 10:17AM PST
  
• License -- This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Deed.  If you would like to distribute a version of this article, please link back to http://www.mindingtheplanet.net from your version, thanks.
• Printable version -- Click here to download the printable PDF version of this article
• Illustrated Version -- See the version by the Lifeboat Foundation

 

Prelude

Many years ago, in the late 1980s, while I was still a college student, I visited my late grandfather, Peter F. Drucker, at his home in Claremont, California. He lived near the campus of Claremont College where he was a professor emeritus. On that particular day, I handed him a manuscript of a book I was trying to write, entitled, "Minding the Planet" about how the Internet would enable the evolution of higher forms of collective intelligence.

My grandfather read my manuscript and later that afternoon we sat together on the outside back porch and he said to me, "One thing is certain: Someday, you will write this book." We both knew that the manuscript I had handed him was not that book, a fact that was later verified when I tried to get it published. I gave up for a while and focused on college, where I was studying philosophy with a focus on artificial intelligence. And soon I started working in the fields of artificial intelligence and supercomputing at companies like Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and Individual.

A few years later, I co-founded one of the early Web companies, EarthWeb, where among other things we built many of the first large commercial Websites and later helped to pioneer Java by creating several large knowledge-sharing communities for software developers. Along the way I continued to think about collective intelligence. EarthWeb and the first wave of the Web came and went. But this interest and vision continued to grow. In 2000 I started researching the necessary technologies to begin building a more intelligent Web. And eventually that led me to start my present company, Radar Networks, where we are now focused on enabling the next-generation of collective intelligence on the Web, using the new technologies of the Semantic Web. 

But ever since that day on the porch with my grandfather, I remembered what he said: "Someday, you will write this book." I've tried many times since then to write it. But it never came out the way I had hoped. So I tried again. Eventually I let go of the book form and created this weblog instead. And as many of my readers know, I've continued to write here about my observations and evolving understanding of this idea over the years. This article is my latest installment, and I think it's the first one that meets my own standards for what I really wanted to communicate. And so I dedicate this article to my grandfather, who inspired me to keep writing this, and who gave me his prediction that I would one day complete it.

This is an article about a new generation of technology that is sometimes called the Semantic Web, and which could also be called the Intelligent Web, or the global mind. But what is the Semantic Web, and why does it matter, and how does it enable collective intelligence? And where is this all headed? And what is the long-term far future going to be like? Is the global mind just science-fiction? Will a world that has a global mind be good place to live in, or will it be some kind of technological nightmare?

Come to the SFWIN Party This Thursday in SF!

The next SFWIN (San Francisco Web Innovators) monthly networking event is happening this Thursday at 6PM in downtown San Francisco at the offices of Orrick, a law firm with a very nice event space overlooking the skyline. We usually have around 100 people or so and delicious food and an open bar. You can get details about the event and RSVP here. Please come, I look forward to seeing you there!

Help Me Answer This -- Specific Blogosphere Stats

Hi everyone, I am trying to generate some specific stats about the size of the Blogosphere. I couldn't find the answer in Dave Sifry's excellent State of the Blogosphere reports. Do any of you know of any studies or reports that answer the following:

• Average number of post per blog
• Average size per blog post
• Average number of comments per post
• Average size per comment
• Distribution of numbers of posts per blog across all blogs
• Distribution of size of posts per blog across all blogs

Good Meeting With Shel Israel

Today our product team met with Shel Isreal to show him the alpha version of what we are building here at Radar Networks and get his feedback. Shel had a lot of good insights. We showed him our full product and explained the vision, and gave him a tour of the new dimension of the Web that we are building. We also showed him how content providers such as bloggers and other site creators, and content consumers, can benefit by joining this system. Then we asked him how he would describe it.

Shel suggested that one way to express the benefit of our product is that it helps content creators, like bloggers, become part of more conversations. "Conversation" is a key word for Shel, as many of you know. He views the Web as a network of conversations, not just a network of content. In a sense, content is a means to an end -- conversation -- rather than an end in itself. So from that perspective we are advancing the state-of-the-art in conversations (broadly speaking, not just in the sense of discussions, but in the sense of connecting people and information together in smarter ways). That's an interesting take on what we are doing that I hadn't really thought about.

Shel also suggested that even though we are still a ways from being ready to launch the beta, he thought what we had was "so much better than anything he has seen" that we should start talking about it more -- without getting into the actual details of how we are doing it (gotta save something for later, after all!).

I'll explain more in future posts.

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.

Blogs on the Job -- New Stats

This study is interesting -- it seems to miss the point that many blogs are loaded with content that is actually USEFUL for work -- for example in-house blogs, blogs from competitors, blogs from industry pundits, blogs from software developers, blogs from users and customers ... and the list goes on. Simply reading blogs cannot be equated with "wasting time" -- in fact it could be very productive market research, product research, etc. The article also mentions that some companies are (insanely) filtering out content containing the word "blog" -- talk about shooting their workers in the foot (or the head)! But despite the simplistic bias of the analysis, the stats are quite interesting. Clearly blogging and blog-reading are a big part of many professionals' workday. And that's interesting to me, and others, who are interested in pushing the envelope of what a blog can be used for...

That co-worker staring, eyes scrunched up, at his computer monitor may look like he's sweating through another hard day's work. But he just might be one of the growing number of office jockeys who, according to new research, have their minds not on their jobs -- but on a blog.
Trade paper AdAge.com reported this week that US workers would waste the equivalent of 551,000 years during 2005 reading blogs, online web diaries and gossip sheets, which have exploded in numbers in recent years.

Around 35 million workers -- one in four of the labour force in the United States -- spend three-and-a-half hours, or nine percent of their working week on blogs, the survey found.

Blogs, which range in tone and quality from scandal sheets to semi-professional news sites to in-depth "geek" technology forums, are often seen as the ultimate expression of online freedom.

"Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40 minute blog break," AdAge quipped, presenting its survey as a best-guess extrapolation based on blog related data.

The AdAge survey mirrors a poll conducted by America Online and Salary.com in July, which found that American workers were goofing off for two hours a day on the Internet, costing their employers 759 billion dollars a year.

But some blog and Internet experts argue that reading a blog in itself does not necessarily equate to wasted time -- and may replace time when workers could be idling away their boss's time doing something else.

"I think it is a little broad brush to turn around and say 'oh, they are reading blogs and it's a waste of time,'" said Steve Ferrer, head of sales and marketing firm The Propaganda House which specializes in the Internet, e-commerce and technology.

"If they weren't reading a blog they might be doing something else not necessarily productive either," said Ferrer, pointing out that some jobs require workers to use blogs and the Internet for research.

Lee Rainie, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said not all blogs were trashy journals -- many are now put out by reputable media firms, and used increasingly by corporations.

"It is not the case that a blog, is a blog, is a blog -- blogs run the spectrum from being ridiculous to the sublime," he said, but admitted : "the notion that some people might not be optimising their time is probably legitimate."

Pew earlier this year released research that suggested that eight million Americans have created blogs, while blog readership jumped 58 percent in 2004 and stood at 27 percent of Internet users.

The AdAge survey coincided with new reports that America's companies may be waking up to lost productivity as desk-bound workers surf the net.

 

My friend Tristan Louis has started a week of posts about metrics for the blogosphere and Web 2.0.

Readers of this site have noticed a recent focus on trying to get some rough numbers and some types of metrics around the blogopshere. Those are part of my trying to figure out whether Web 2.0 is a bubble or whether it is really different from web 1.0. To that extent, I've been working on a series of entries relating to metrics in the blogosphere and web 2.0 world. I'm sure that many of the statements I will be making over the course of the next week will be controversial but I expect to stir up discussion of what Web 2.0 means in terms of real numbers.

The series is going to be broken down into five main chapters. Today, I'm going to go over the basics of measurement and who needs them. Day 2 will be about hard metrics (aka. the measurable ones.) Day 3 will delve into soft metrics (ie. the ones that are harder to measure.) On day 4, I will try to weight all those values out in order to get some types of basic formulas for measuring web 2.0 performance. An finally, on day 5, I will review what I expect to be a fair amount of commentary being made in the blogosphere about the previous four entries.

How to Keep Founders Involved Once Companies Grow

Fred Wilson has an intersting post about how to keep founders engaged in the companies they started after they step out of CEO roles. He says:

I'd like to find a formula (like the one Yahoo! has found) and bottle it.  Because I believe companies that can keep their founders engaged and motivated are so much better off than those that cannot.

I think the key to this is to understand the mentality of founders. We are people who choose to start things instead of join things that already exist. We thrive on invention and the opportunity to disrupt existing systems. We are evangelists and communicators -- we get the most satisfaction from being able to transmit our excitement to others. We are more motivated by the slight chance of huge upside than a guaranteed but limited win. We have no fear of personal financial risk -- perhaps even irrationally so -- we are eternal optimists and believe we will always prevail. We look to the future more than the present or the past. We are highly competitive and need to be in leadership roles but we hate beaurocracy and the inefficiencies of large organizations, which is why we start small ones. We are more interested in what hasn't been built yet, than what is already working. We strive to be successful, but not merely in financial terms -- acknowledgement for our ideas and creations from our peers is even more satisfying than making money.

Generally we are workaholics and we are comfortable wearing many hats -- and in fact we often wear our many hats better than specialists who only wear one hat. Rather than wait for others to things, we tend to just get them done ourselves -- a skill which is great for small companies but perhaps disruptive in large ones. We are generally not top-down managers and we don't like to treat others as non-equals -- another reason why we like startups where everyone is collaborating as a team.

What does all this mean? To me it means that VC's and companies that wish to keep their founders involved, after they are no longer in the CEO role, need to find ways that their founders can do what they do best for the company, rather than somewhere else. In other words, they have to give founders the ability to invent and incubate new business, or lines of business, for the company. They also have to make sure that founders never feel sidelined our overshadowed by the hired management teams that come in when companies start growing.

I believe that it is often a good thing to bring in professional CEO's -- for example, when companies get large enough in people and revenues to require managers with large-enterprise management skills. But it's also vital not to bring in hired leadership until the company is really large enough, and focused enough, to warrant it. If done to early, bringing outsiders in to run a company, can destroy the company's DNA rather than replicate it.

I think the formula for managing this transition successfully is:

• Only bring in outside CEO's to take over leadership when a company has grown up (or is about to) -- when it is large enough in people and revenues to need a new level of structure and management.
• Keep founders motivated by giving them the freedom to innovate and incubate new businesses within the framework of the existing venture.
• Utilize the founders as evangelists, keep them in the spotlight -- don't marginalize them internally or externally.
• VC's should make sure the founders have the last word, and veto power, in choosing the new leadership -- even if they technically don't have an equity majority in the company anymore. Additionally the choice of a new CEO should be carefully tailored to fit the personality of the founders. Some founders don't like to be in the spotlight, others do. It's important that the new CEO's ego is compatible with their egos, or lack thereof.
• Make sure the founders are made a part of the new leadership team so that they continue to feel a sense of ownership and control in their companies.
• Instead of the founders reporting to the new management team, it should be the reverse. The new management team should report to the founders (not on a day-to-level -- but perhaps on a quarterly level).
• The transition from leadership by the Founders to leadership by a new CEO and management team has to be handled carefully. Often there is a strong bond of loyalty between the Founders and key employees who were there from the early days. In order for key employees to accept the new leadership, and not see it as a negative sign, there has to be an unambiguous communication to key employees and staff about the benefits, and support of the Founders, of the change. If not managed well such transitions come across as "management shakeups" rather than positive developments for the business.
• Make sure the founders still have as great or greater opportunities for huge upside within the venture, as they might have by starting something new outside the venture.

I think companies that follow these principles make a successful transition to professional management while continuing to harness the tremendous energy, inspiration and initiative that their founders can provide. The best combination, in my opinon, is when the new CEO is less of a star and more of a manager. Founders usually provide the charisma and media savvy. What they need is someone who can build the structure and discipline to back them up.

I think the case of Google is a great example. Larry and Sergey get to be the guys in front of the cameras. Eric, who has always been a speak-softly-but-carry-a-big-stick guy, is the man making things run. They don't compete -- it's very complementary. In the case of Yahoo, it's a different arrangement. I rarely ever see the original Yahoo founders in print or elsewhere -- they seem to have vanished -- yet they are still there it turns out. In Yahoo -- which has become a media company -- it's Terry Semel who is the media star in the spotlight. It seems to be working, but clearly the personal goals of the Yahoo founders are quite different from the Google founders because they were willing to take more of a backseat role.

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.

Tristan on the New RSS Standards War

Tristan, has written an important article on the emerging RSS standards war, in which he suggests some solutions to the divergent format specs that are popping up right now.

Marc's Universal "Blog This" Button

Marc has developed an interesting new service that provides a universal "one-stop shop" for posting microcontent to various blogs. It's a sort of universal "blog this" button that anyone can use. Nice idea. Marc explains it better than I can, so here it is in his own words.

Excellent Analysis of Weblog Tools Market

This article provides some very compelling and useful statistics about the growth of the Weblog tools market.

Folktologies -- Beyond the Folksonomy vs. Ontology Distinction

First of all I know Clay Shirky, and he's a good fellow. But he's simply wrong about his claim that "tagging" (of the flavor that is appearing on del.icio.us -- what I call "social tagging") is inherently better than the use of formal ontologies. Clay favors the tagging approach because it is bottom-up and emergent in nature, and he argues against ontologies because pre-specification cannot anticipate the future. But this is a simplistic view of both approaches. One could just as easily argue against tagging systems because they don't anticipate the future -- they are shortsighted, now-oriented systems that fail to capture the "big picture" or to optimally organize resources for the long-term. Their saving grace is that over time they do (hopefully) self-organize and prune out the chaff, but that depends both on the level of participation and the quality of that participation.

A Blog Novel

Rohit Gupta, a Bombay-based writer, who also reads this blog, is writing a blog-novel. He has come up with an innovative way to promote it -- by letting readers choose quotes from his text to "own" -- by choosing a quote and linking to his blog-novel from it, he will in return link back to your blog from that quote in his novel. It's similar to my earlier GoMeme experiments, except in this case his novel is the meme that is spreading via a cooperative linking incentive.

Good idea, Rohit! I choose this quote from your novel:

"The other article, an interesting one, is a 2000-word piece on the history of mathematical heretics known as the Circlesquarers, and the transcendental nature of the number Π."

Detailed Analysis of GoMeme 1.0 Results

Greg Tyrell, a PhD student with a strong interest in bioinformatics, has put together a detailed analysis and report on the GoMeme 1.0 experiment, containing several visualizations and results of the survey. Nice work Greg!

Also in other news, Google has started indexing the results. Currently there are 733 results when searching for sites with original, super-long GUID. There are 867 results when searching for the unique string "To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate" which was in the instructions -- this number should include sites that did not put the whole GUID in. Technorati, which seems to be working better today, finds 58 sites with the long GUID, and none for the instructions text above. So I guess Google wins so far. But I am glad that Technorati is starting to get their bugs fixed! I noticed that blog stats are starting to be updated again.

I also got an interesting link to another Meme visualization, which although having nothing to do with our experiment as far as I can tell, is a nice concept. It takes forever to build out the full visualization and the tree appears to be almost white on my white background making it hard to see, but still worth a look -- Meme Tree

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 .

Can You Imagine What Would Happen if MoveOn.Org Used the GoMeme Concept?

I wonder if anyone from MoveOn.Org or the Republicans will notice our GoMeme experiments? (Not that I'm taking sides -- I'll simply be happy if somebody wins the election!) Grassroots political campaigns could potentially really benefit from the techniques we're testing here. For example, imagine a "blog meme" for a political campaign -- a meme that states some useful facts about a candidate and their opponent, perhaps has some survey questions and a GUID, and has the added benefit of a cool Improve-Your-Google-Ranking-By-Hosting-This-Meme candy coating? Wow -- it could spread the message to a lot of blogs pretty quickly if done right. That might actually work. But I try to stay out of politics, so I'm not taking sides here or endorsing anyone. If you read this and know the "right people" -- feel free to suggest the idea to them.

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.

A New Blogging Feature: Automated "Social Syndication" Networks

Here's an idea I've had recently that is related to the Meme Propagation experiment (see posts below on this blog for more about that ongoing experiment). The concept is for a new, meme-based, way to syndicate content across blogs. Here's how it might work:

1. You join a "meme syndication network" by joining at a central site. You get an account where you can profile your blog. You also set your blog's syndication inputs -- a set of other blogs that are also in the network that you are willing to automatically syndicate content from.

2. When you complete this, you are given an automatically generated HTML element containing a script to put in your blog sidebar, or anywhere else in your layout. This script is auto-generated for you from a central site that manages the network. The script automatically displays short excerpts for blog postings (pieces of microcontent) that have been "picked up" by your site from your registered "inputs" in the network. You place this script in your layout.

3. In the area created by the script in your site, you see a listing of blog postings that have been syndicated to your site from your inputs. You can post to your network by going to your account at the central network site and posting (or copying in the URL for anything you want to post) there. Any network-member sites that treat your node in the network as an "input" will then *automatically* pickup your posting and display it on their page.

Is Your Blog a Hot Zone?

Meme Update: The Meme is already global and the rate of growth is showing signs of exponential increase. It's made the Daypop top list, also same with Blogdex. It's made its way onto several early-adopter sites and lists. Already the results are interesting. One thing that is clear is that there is quite a lag time in Blogspace: This applies not just to blogs, but also to aggregation sites and search sites -- which don't update nearly as often as one might think.

Comments:

It seems that certain bloggers read and post much more frequently than others -- we could call their blogs "hot zones," to borrow a term from epidemiology.
.

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."

Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind

Draft 1.1 for Review (integrates some fixes from readers)
Nova Spivack (www.mindingtheplanet.net)

INTRODUCTION

This article presents some thoughts about the future of intelligence on Earth. In particular, I discuss the similarities between the Internet and the brain, and how I believe the emerging Semantic Web will make this similarity even greater.

DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE

The Semantic Web enables the formal communication of a higher level of language -- metalanguage. Metalanguage is language about language -- language that encodes knowledge about how to interpret and use information. Metalanguages – particularly semantic metalanguages for encoding relationships between information and systems of concepts – enable a new layer of communication and processing. The combination of computing networks with semantic metalanguages represents a major leap in the history of communication and intelligence.

The invention of written language long ago changed the economics of communication by making it possible for information to be represented and shared independently of human minds. This made it less costly to develop and spread ideas widely across populations in space and time. Similarly, the emergence of software based on semantic metalanguages will dramatically change the economics not only of information distribution, but of intelligence -- the act of processing and using information.

Semantic metalanguages provide a way to formally express, distribute and share the knowledge necessary to interpret and use information, independently of the human mind. In other words, they make it possible not just to write down and share information, but also to encode and share the background necessary for intelligently making use of that information. Prior to the invention of such a means to share this background knowledge about information, although information could be written and shared, the recipients of such information had to be intelligent and appropriately knowledgeable in advance in order to understand it. Semantic metalanguages remove this restriction by making it possible to distill the knowledge necessary to understand information into a form that can be shared just as easily as the information itself.

The recipients of information – whether humans or software – no longer have to know in advance (or attempt to deduce) how to interpret and use the information; this knowledge is explicitly coded in the metalanguage about the information. This is important for artificial intelligence because it means that expertise for specific domains does not have to be hard-coded into programs anymore -- instead programs simply need to know how to interpret the metalanguage. By adding semantic metalanguage statements to information data becomes “smarter,” and programs can therefore become “thinner.” Once programs can speak this metalanguage they can easily import and use knowledge about any particular domain, if and when needed, so long as that knowledge is expressed in the metalanguage.

In other words, whereas basic written languages simply make raw information portable, semantic metalanguages make knowledge (conceptual systems) and even intelligence (procedures for processing knowledge) about information portable. They make it possible for knowledge and intelligence to be formally expressed, stored digitally, and shared independently of any particular minds or programs. This radically changes the economics of communicating knowledge and of accessing and training intelligence. It makes it possible for intelligence to be more quickly, easily and broadly distributed across time, space and populations of not only humans but also of software programs.

The emergence of standards for sharing semantic metalanguage statements that encode the meaning of information will catalyze a new era of distributed knowledge and intelligence on the Internet. This will effectively “make the Internet smarter.” Not just monolithic expert systems and complex neural networks, but even simple desktop programs and online software agents will begin to have access to a vast decentralized reserve of knowledge and intelligence.

The externalization, standardization and sharing of knowledge and intelligence in this manner, will make it possible for communities of humans and software agents to collaborate on cognition, not just on information. As this happens and becomes increasingly linked into our daily lives and tools, the "network effect" will deliver increasing returns. While today most of the intelligence on Earth still resides within human brains, In the near future, perhaps even within our lifetimes, the vast majority of intelligence will exist outside of human brains on the Semantic Web.

THE INTERNET IS A BRAIN AND THE WEB IS ITS MIND

Anyone familiar with the architecture and dynamics of the human nervous system cannot help but notice the striking similarity between the brain and the Internet. But is this similarity more than a coincidence - is the Internet really a brain in its own right - the brain of our planet? And is its collective behavior intelligent - does it constitute a global mind? How might this collective form of intelligence compare to that of an individual human mind, or a group of human minds?

I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software, humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly intelligent global mind. This global mind is not centrally organized or controlled, rather it is a bottom-up, emergent, self-organizing phenomenon formed from flows of trillions of information-processing events comprised of billions of independent information processors.

As with other types of emergent computing systems, for example John Conway’s familiar cellular automaton “The Game of Life,” on the Internet large scale homeostatic systems and seemingly intentional or guided information processes naturally emerge and interact within it. The emergence of sophisticated information systems does not require top-down design or control, it can happen in an evolutionary bottom-up manner as well.

Like a human brain, the Internet is a vast distributed computing network comprised of billions of interacting parallel processors. These processors include individual human beings as well as software programs, and systems of them such as organizations, which can all be referred to as "agents" in this system. Just as the computational power of the human brain as a whole is vastly greater than that of any of the individual neurons or systems within it, the computational power of the Internet is vastly beyond any of the individual agents it contains. Just as the human brain is not merely the sum of its parts, the Internet is more than the sum of its parts - like other types of distributed emergent computing systems, it benefits from the network effect. The power of the system grows exponentially as agents and connections between them are added.

The human brain is enabled by an infrastructure comprised of networks of organic neurons, dendrites, synapses and protocols for processing chemical and electrical messages. The Internet is enabled by an infrastructure of synthetic computers, communications networks, interfaces, and protocols for processing digital information structures. The Internet also interfaces with organic components however – the human beings who are connected to it. In that sense the Internet is not merely an inorganic system – it could not function without help from humans, for the moment at least. The Internet may not be organized in exactly the same form as the human brain, but it is at least safe to say it is an extension of it.

The brain provides a memory system for storing, locating and recalling information. The Internet also provides shared address spaces and protocols for using them. This enables agents to participate in collaborative cognition in a completely decentralized manner. It also provides a standardized shared environment in which information may be stored, addressed and retrieved by any agent of the system. This shared information space functions as the collective memory of the global mind.

Just as no individual neuron in the human brain could be said to have the same form or degree of intelligence as the brain as-a-whole - we individual humans cannot possibly comprehend the distributed intelligence that is evolving on the Internet. But we are part of it nonetheless, whether we know it or not.  The global mind is emerging all around us, and via us, is our creation but it is already becoming independent of us - truly it represents the evolution of a new form of meta-level intelligence that has never before existed on our planet.

Although we created it, the Internet is already far beyond our control or comprehension - it surrounds us and penetrates our world - it is inside our buildings, our tools, our vehicles, and it connects us together and modulates our interactions. As this process continues and the human body and biology begins to be networked into this system we will literally become part of this network - it will become an extension of our nervous systems and eventually, via brain-computer interfaces, it will be an extension of our senses and our minds. Eventually the distinction between humans and machines, and the individual and the collective, will gradually start to dissolve, along with the distinction between human and artificial forms of intelligence.

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.

Latest Stats on the Blogosphere...

Dave reports that Technorati broke the "2 million weblogs tracked milestone" today. He states that there are about 12,000 new weblogs created per day now, and about 150,000 weblog updates per day and growing.

Ads Moving to Weblogs... Ad Space on My Site for Sale

Advertising moves to Weblogs. It had to happen eventually. Now that we're on the subject, let me know if you want to advertise on this site.

Critical Comparison of Existing Social Network Sites

This is a very well thought-out critical review of the pros and cons of various social networking sites. Full of insights for those of us in the biz.

Nice Illustration of How News Travels Across the Metaweb

This is a really good article with a cool illustration of how news moves across the Metaweb. Definitely take a look at it.

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.

From Application-Centric to Data-Centric Computing: The Metaweb

One of the big changes that will be enabled by the coming Metaweb is the shift from application-centric computing to data-centric computing. As the Metaweb evolves, information will be imbued with increasingly sophisticated metadata. HTML provides metadata about formatting and links. XML provides metadata about structure and behavior. RDF, RDFS and OWL provide metadata about relationships and meaning.

As higher levels of metadata are adopted and added to content, the content becomes "smarter" -- more information about how to display, use and interpret the content is added to the content itself. The key here is that this metadata is added in an application-independent manner. In other words, the "intelligence" for interpreting the data is moved out of applications and into the data itself. Thus we move from "smart applications, dumb data" to "smart applications, smart data."

A data-centric world will be very different from the application-centric world of today -- for one thing, application providers will lose much of their competitive advantages (from platform lock-in and closed formats) as data becomes increasingly portable across various tools. Another big change will be in how we think about content -- rather than content being thought of as static documents, every piece of content will be more like an object with its own unique identity and behaviors on the network.

Instead of moving data around we will access these semantic data objects using Web services protocols and interact with them from anywhere like mini-online services. To edit a document we might send commands to an object that represents the document on the network, rather than actually downloading and modifying a local file.

Ultimately this will bring about a shift from desktop computing to network computing -- software will truly become a service and the business model of software will shift to be more like online service business models -- based on subscriptions, a la carte pay-per-use features, and perhaps even advertising. Data objects will be accessible from everywhere and will be responsible for maintaining their own state, relationships and contents, as well as managing their own access, rights and usage policies. These are some of the changes that will come about as the Metaweb evolves.

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.

Blogging Study Stats Released

The Internet and American Life Project found that between 2 and 7 percent of Americans have weblogs, and about 10 percent of them update their blogs regularly. 11 Percent of surfers reported visiting blogs. The study was a random telephone survey of 1,555 Internet users with a 3 percent margin of error.

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...

Desktop Social Networking Apps Are not Defensible

Before you invest time, content, relationships or money in any desktop social software play, be forewarned, this idea is already "old hat" and there already several apps out there that combine social networking, chat, and community features. Note that here I am placing emphasis on "desktop" -- my point is not to malign social networking in general, but rather to reveal the weaknesses of any business model that is focused around trying to make money from a desktop software tool for social networking. In contrast to desktop tools for social networking, Web-hosted social networking portals such as LinkedIn, Orkut, Ryze, Tribe and Friendster make a lot of sense and are proving to be highly viral (although not necessarily useful or commercially viable yet). This article presents detailed arguments that make a case for why desktop social networking software tools will not be able to survive in the long-term.

Semantic Web Officially Approved by W3C

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

Distributed Social Software

Ran across this paper on some ideas for distributed, peer-to-peer social software. It's a very nice overview of some of the main ideas and benefits of a decentralized model for social networking, and also touches on Semantic Web topics. Interestingly the author has hit upon many of the major themes in Radar Networks' platform -- which implements the functionality that he proposes and more.