This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

Video of my Talk at Digital Now

This is a video of my talk at the Digital Now conference in Orlando yesterday. There's a long intro by Don Dea, and then I speak (starting at index 05:14) about the Semantic Web and Twine.

Great Collective Intelligence Book; Includes a Chapter I Wrote

I highly recommend this new book on Collective Intelligence. It features chapters by a Who's Who of thinkers on Collective Intelligence, including a chapter by me about "Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of the World Wide Web."

Here is the full-text of my chapter, minus illustrations (the rest of the book is great and I suggest you buy it to have on your shelf. It's a big volume and worth the read):

 

The Wikipedia, Knowledge Preservation and DNA

I had an interesting thought today about the long-term preservation and transmission of human knowledge.

The Wikipedia may be on its way to becoming the one of the best places in which to preserve knowledge for future generations. But this is just the beginning. What if we could encode the Wikipedia into the Junk DNA portion of our own genome? It appears that something like this may actually be possible -- at least according some recent studies of the non-coding regions of the human genome.

If we could actually encode knowledge, like the Wikipedia for example, into our genome, the next logical step would be to find a way to access it directly.

At first we might only be able to access and read the knowledge stored in our DNA through a computationally intensive genetic analysis of an individual's DNA. In order to correct any errors in the data from mutuation, we would also need to cross-reference this individual data with similar analyses from the DNA of other people who also carry this data in their DNA. But this is just the beginning. There are however ways to stored data such that there is enough redundancy to protect against degradation. Assuming we could do this we might be able to eliminate the need for cross referencing as a form of error correction -- the data itself would be self-correcting so to speak. If we could accomplish this then the next step would be to find a way for an individual to access the knowledge stored in their DNA in real-time, directly. That's a long way off but there may be a way to do this using some future nano-scale genomic-brain interface. This opens up some fascinating areas of speculation to say the least.

 

 

Great Article about Benefits of Twine from a Beta User

If you are interested in hearing about how some users are using the Twine invite-only beta test, here is a great article about why one user migrated to Twine from del.icio.us.

Cool Twine Fan Video by a High-School Student

I was pleasantly surprised to see a very nice fan video for Twine created by a high-school student who is in our beta test. It gives the flavor of Twine and is really nice.

A Few Predictions for the Near Future

This is a five minute video in which I was asked to make some predictions for the next decade about the Semantic Web, search and artificial intelligence. It was done at the NextWeb conference and was a fun interview.

Learning from the Future with Nova Spivack from Maarten on Vimeo.

Good Article on History of Talks Between Tibet and China

This article sheds some light on the history of attempts to find a resolution between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. I found it to be quite educational. There have in fact been numerous attempts to find a solution, but the process has been frozen in a deadlock for 50 years. The Chinese government has been the principle roadblock to this process -- they do not want to engage in high-level talks with the Dalai Lama's government. It would be easy to resolve this if serious, genuine high-level talks were to happen -- talks between the Dalai Lama and the Premier of China, for example. Until that happens, this situation will only get worse. It has to be resolved at the highest levels. The Dalai Lama has said he would be happy to engage in such talks. Why is the Chinese government not willing to participate?