This Blog has Moved to NovaSpivack.com

Republished from March 11: Twine CEO Comments about Evri Acquisition

Please see this article -- my comments on the Evri/Twine deal, as CEO of Twine. This provides more details about the history of Twine and what led to the acquisition.

Video: My Talk on the Evolution of the Global Brain at the Singularity Summit

If you are interested in collective intelligence, consciousness, the global brain and the evolution of artificial intelligence and superhuman intelligence, you may want to see my talk at the 2008 Singularity Summit. The videos from the Summit have just come online.

(Many thanks to Hrafn Thorisson who worked with me as my research assistant for this talk).

Fast Company Interview -- "Connective Intelligence"

In this interview with Fast Company, I discuss my concept of "connective intelligence." Intelligence is really in the connections between things, not the things themselves. Twine facilitates smarter connections between content, and between people. This facilitates the emergence of higher levels of collective intelligence.

The Future of the Desktop

(Brief excerpt from a new post on my Public Twine -- Go there to read the whole thing and comment on it with me and others...).

I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I've come up so far.

This is a raw, first-draft of what I think it will be like.

Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

No. We've already seen several attempts at doing that -- and they never catch on. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC.

Partly this is due to the difference in user experience between using real live folders, windows and menus on a local machine and doing that in "simulated" fashion via some Flash-based or HTML-based imitation of a desktop.

Web desktops to-date have simply have been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it.

Whoever does succeed in nailing this opportunity will have a real shot at becoming a very important player in the next-generation of the Web, Web 3.0.

From the points above it should be clear that I think the future of the desktop is going to be significantly different from what our desktops are like today.

It's going to be a hosted web service

Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there is going to be some kind of interface that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it will become unified across devices.

Currently we have different spaces on different devices (laptop, mobile device, PC). These will merge. In order for that to happen they will ultimately have to be provided as a service via the Web. Local clients may be created for various devices, but ultimately the most logical choice is to just use the browser as the client.

Our desktop will not come from any local device and will always be available to us on all our devices.

 

The skin of your desktop will probably appear within your local device's browser as a completely dynamically hosted web application coming from a remote server. It will load like a Web page, on-demand from a URL.

This new desktop will provide an interface both to your local device, applications and information, as well as to your online life and information.

Instead of the browser running inside, or being launched from, some kind of next-generation desktop web interface technology, it's will be the other way around: The browser will be the shell and the desktop application will run within it either as a browser add-in, or as a web-based application.

The Web 3.0 desktop is going to be completely merged with the Web -- it is going to be part of the Web. There will be no distinction between the desktop and the Web anymore.

Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an applicaiton. But actually it will be the other way around in the future: Our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.

The focus shifts from information to attention

As our digital lives shift from being focused on the old fashioned desktop (space-based metaphor) to the Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (river of news, feeds, blogs, lifestreaming, microblogging).

Instead of being a big directory, the desktop of the future is going to be more like a Feed reader or social news site. The focus will be on keep up with all the stuff flowing through and what the trends are, rather than on all the stuff that is stored there already.

The focus will be on helping the user to manage their attention rather than just their information.

This is a leap to the meta-level. A second-order desktop. Instead of just being about the information (the first-order), it is going to be about what is happening with the information (the second-order).

It's going to shift us from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

Our digital roles are already shifting from effectively acting as "librarians" to becoming more like "daytraders." We are all focusing more on keep up with change than on organizing information today. This will continue to eat up more of our attention...

Read the rest of this on my public Twine! http://www.twine.com/item/11bshgkbr-1k5/the-future-of-the-desktop

Artificial Stupidity: The Next Big Thing

There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence over the years. And recently it seems there has been a resurgence in interest in this topic in the media. But artificial intelligence scares me. And frankly, I don't need it. My human intelligence is quite good, thank you very much. And as far as trusting computers to make intelligent decisions on my behalf, I'm skeptical to say the least. I don't need or want artificial intelligence.

No, what I really need is artificial stupidity.

I need software that will automate all the stupid things I presently have to waste far too much of my valuable time on. I need something to do all the stupid tasks -- like organizing email, filing documents, organizing folders, remembering things, coordinating schedules, finding things that are of interest, filtering out things that are not of interest, responding to routine messages, re-organizing things, linking things, tracking things, researching prices and deals, and the many other rote information tasks I deal with every day.

The human brain is the result of millions of years of evolution. It's already the most intelligent thing on this planet. Why are we wasting so much of our brainpower on tasks that don't require intelligence? The next revolution in software and the Web is not going to be artificial intelligence, it's going to be creating artificial stupidity: systems that can do a really good job at the stupid stuff, so we have more time to use our intelligence for higher level thinking.

The next wave of software and the Web will be about making software and the Web smarter. But when we say "smarter" we don't mean smart like a human is smart, we mean "smarter at doing the stupid things that humans aren't good at." In fact humans are really bad at doing relatively simple, "stupid" things -- tasks that don't require much intelligence at all.

For example, organizing. We are terrible organizers. We are lazy, messy, inconsistent, and we make all kinds of errors by accident. We are terrible at tagging and linking as well, it turns out. We are terrible at coordinating or tracking multiple things at once because we are easily overloaded and we can really only do one thing well at a time. These kinds of tasks are just not what our brains are good at. That's what computers are for - or should be for at least.

Humans are really good at higher level cognition: complex thinking, decisionmaking, learning, teaching, inventing, expressing, exploring, planning, reasoning, sensemaking, and problem solving -- but we are just terrible at managing email, or making sense of the Web. Let's play to our strengths and use computers to compensate for our weaknesses.

I think it's time we stop talking about artificial intelligence -- which nobody really needs, and fewer will ever trust. Instead we should be working on artificial stupidity. Sometimes the less lofty goals are the ones that turn out to be most useful in the end.

Powerpoint Deck: Making Sense of the Semantic Web, and Twine

Now that I have been asked by several dozen people for the slides from my talk on "Making Sense of the Semantic Web," I guess it's time to put them online. So here they are, under the Creative Commons Attribution License (you can share it with attribution this site).

You can download the Powerpoint file at the link below:

Download nova_spivack_semantic_web_talk.ppt

Or you can view it right here:

| View | Upload your own

Enjoy! And I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

Quick Video Preview of Twine

The New Scientist just posted a quick video preview of Twine to YouTube. It only shows a tiny bit of the functionality, but it's a sneak peak.

We've been letting early beta testers into Twine and we're learning a lot from all the great feedback, and also starting to see some cool new uses of Twine. There are around 20,000 people on the wait-list already, and more joining every day. We're letting testers in slowly, focusing mainly on people who can really help us beta test the software at this early stage, as we go through iterations on the app. We're getting some very helpful user feedback to make Twine better before we open it up the world.

For now, here's a quick video preview:

A Video and an Audio Cast About Twine

Last night I saw that the video of my presentation of Twine at the Web 2.0 Summit is online. My session, "The Semantic Edge," featured Danny Hillis of Metaweb demoing Freebase, Barney Pell demoing Powerset, and myself Demoing Twine, followed by a brief panel discussion with Tim O'Reilly (in that order). It's a good panel and I recommend the video, however, the folks at Web 2.0 only filmed the presenters; they didn't capture what we were showing on our screens, so you have to use your imagination as we describe our demos.

An audio cast of one of my presentations about Twine to a reporter was also put online recently, for a more in-depth description.

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.

Radar Networks Coming Out of Stealth - Friday, October 19

News Flash!

My company, Radar Networks, is coming out of stealth this Friday, October 19, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. I'll be speaking on "The Semantic Edge Panel" at 4:10 PM, and publicly showing our Semantic Web online service for the first time. If you are planning to come to Web 2.0, I hope to see you at my panel.

Here's the official Media Alert below:

               

(PRWEB) October 15, 2007 -- At the Web2.0 Summit on October 19th, Radar Networks will announce a revolutionary new service that uses the power of the emerging Semantic Web to enable a smarter way of sharing, organizing and finding information. Founder and CEO Nova Spivack will also give the first public preview of Radar’s application, which is one of the first examples of “Web 3.0” – the next-generation of the Web, in which the Web begins to function more like a database, and software grows more intelligent and helpful.

Join Nova as he participates in “The Semantic Edge” panel discussion with esteemed colleagues including Powerset’s Barney Pell and Metaweb’s Daniel Hillis, moderated by Tim O’Reilly.

Who:   
Radar Networks Founder and CEO Nova Spivack

When:   
Friday, October 19, 2007
4:10 – 4:55 p.m.
   
Where: 
Web2.0 Summit
Palace Hotel
Grand Ballroom
2 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco,  California  94105
   

Gartner is Wrong about Web 3.0

I have a lot of respect for the folks at Gartner, but their recent report in which they support the term "Web 2.0" yet claim that the term "Web 3.0" is just a marketing ploy, is a bit misguided.

In fact, quite the opposite is true.

The term Web 2.0 is in fact just a marketing ploy. It has only come to have something resembling a definition over time. Because it is in fact so ill-defined, I've suggested in the past that we just use it to refer to a decade: the second decade of the Web (2000 - 2010). After all there is no actual technology that is called "Web 2.0" -- at best there are a whole slew of things which this term seems to label, and many of them are design patterns, not technologies. For example "tagging" is not a technology, it is a design pattern. A tag is a keyword, a string of text -- there is not really any new technology there. AJAX is also not a technology in its own right, but rather a combination of technologies and design patterns, most of which existed individually before the onset of what is called Web 2.0.

In contrast, the term Web 3.0 actually does refer to a set of new technologies, and changes they will usher in during the third decade of the Web (2010 - 2020). Chief among these is the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is actually not one technology, but many. Some of them such as RDF and OWL have been under development for years, even during the Web 2.0 era, and others such as SPARQL and GRDDL are recent emerging standards. But that is just the beginning. As the Semantic Web develops there will be several new technology pieces added to the puzzle for reasoning, developing and sharing open rule definitions, handling issues around trust, agents, machine learning, ontology development and integration, semantic data storage, retrieval and search, and many other subjects.

Essentially, the Semantic Web enables the gradual transformation of the Web into a database. This is a profound structural change that will touch every layer of Web technology eventually. It will transform database technology, CMS, CRM, enterprise middleware, systems integration, development tools, search engines, groupware, supply-chain integration, and all the other topics that Gartner covers.

The Semantic Web will manifest in several ways. In many cases it will improve applications and services we already use. So for example, we will see semantic social networks, semantic search, semantic groupware, semantic CMS, semantic CRM, semantic email, and many other semantic versions of apps we use today. For a specific example, take social networking. We are seeing much talk about "opening  up the social graph" so that social networks are more connected and portable. Ultimately to do this right, the social graph should be represented using Semantic Web standards, so that it truly is not only open but also easily extensible and mashable with other data. 

Web 3.0 is not ONLY the Semantic Web however. Other emerging technologies may play a big role as well. Gartner seems to think Virtual Reality will be one of them. Perhaps, but to be fair, VR is actually a Web 1.0 phenomenon. It's been around for a long time, and it hasn't really changed that much. In fact the folks at the MIT Media Lab were working on things that are still far ahead of Second Life, even back in the early 1990's.

So what other technologies can we expect in Web 3.0 that are actually new? I expect that we will have a big rise in "cloud computing" such as open peer-to-peer grid storage and computing capabilities on the Web -- giving any application essentially as much storage and computational power as needed for free or a very low cost. In the mobile arena we will see higher bandwidth, more storage and more powerful processors in mobile devices, as well as powerful built-in speech recognition, GPS and motion sensors enabling new uses to emerge. I think we will also see an increase in the power of personalization tools and personal assistant tools that try to help users manage the complexity of their digital lives. In the search arena, we will see search engines get smarter -- among other things they will start to not only answer questions, but they will accept commands such as "find me a cheap flight to NYC" and they will learn and improve as they are used. We will also see big improvements in integration and data and account portability between different Web applications. We will also see a fundamental change in the database world as databases move away from the relational model and object model, towards the associative model of data (graph databases and triplestores).

In short, Web 3.0 is about hard-core new technologies and is going to have a much greater impact on enterprise IT managers and IT systems than Web 2.0. But ironically, it may not be until Web 4.0 (2020 - 2030) that Gartner comes to this conclusion!

Knowledge Networking

I've been thinking for several years about Knowledge Networking. It's not a term I invented, it's been floating around as a meme for at least a decade or two. But recently it has started to resurface in my own work.

So what is a knowledge network? I define a knowledge network as a form of collective intelligence in which a network of people (two or more people connected by social-communication relationships) creates, organizes, and uses a collective body of knowledge. The key here is that a knowledge network is not merely a site where a group of people work on a body of information together (such as the wikipedia), it's also a social network -- there is an explicit representation of a social relationship within it. So it's more like a social network than for example a discussion forum or a wiki.

I would go so far as to say that knowledge networks are the third-generation of social software. (Note this is based in-part on ideas that emerged in conversations I have had with Peter Rip, so this also his idea):

• First-generation social apps were about communication (eg. messaging such as Email, discussion boards, chat rooms, and IM)
• Second-generation social apps were about people and content (eg. Social networks, social media sharing, user-generated content)
• Third-generation social apps are about relationships and knowledge  (eg. Wikis, referral networks, question and answer systems, social recommendation systems, vertical knowledge and expertise portals, social mashup apps, and coming soon, what we're building at Radar Networks)

Just some thoughts on a Saturday morning...

The Rise of the Social Operating System

In recent months we have witnessed a number of social networking sites begin to open up their platforms to outside developers. While this trend has been exhibited most prominently by Facebook, it is being embraced by all the leading social networking services, such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Myspace and others. Along separate dimensions we also see a similar trend towards "platformization" in IM platforms such as Skype as well as B2B tools such as Salesforce.com.

If we zoom out and look at all this activity from a distance it appears that there is a race taking place to become "the social operating" system of the Web. A social operating system might be defined as a system that provides for systematic management and facilitation of human social relationships and interactions.

We might list some of the key capabilities of an ideal "social operating system" as:

• Identity management
  • Open portable identity
  • Personal profiles ("personas")
  • Privacy control
• Relationship management
  • Directory and lookup services (location of people to communicate with)
  • Social networking (opt-in relationship formation, indirect social connectivity via social networks)
  • Spam control
• Communication
  • Person to person communication
    • Synchronous (IM, VOIP)
    • Asynchronous (email, SMS)
  • Group communication
    • Synchronous (conferencing)
    • Asynchronous (group discussions)
• Social Content distribution
  
  • Personal publishing (blogging, home pages)
  • Public content distribution
• Social Coordination
  • Event management (scheduling, invitations, RSVP's)
  • Calendaring
• Social Collaboration
  • File sharing
  • Document collaboration (communal authoring/editing)
  • Collaborative filtering
  • Recommendation systems
  • Knowledge management
  • Human powered search
  • Project management
  • Workflow
• Commerce
  • Classified advertising
  • Auctions
  • Shopping

Today I have not seen any single player that provides a coherent solution to this entire "social stack" however Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL are probably the strongest contenders. Can Facebook and other social networks truly compete or will they ultimately be absorbed into one of these larger players?

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.

Radar Networks Profiled in Technology Review

The MIT Technology Review just published a large article on the Semantic Web and Web 3.0, in which Radar Networks, Metaweb, Joost, RealTravel and other ventures are profiled.

Breaking the Collective IQ Barrier -- Making Groups Smarter

I've been thinking since 1994 about how to get past a fundamental barrier to human social progress, which I call "The Collective IQ Barrier." Most recently I have been approaching this challenge in the products we are developing at my stealth venture, Radar Networks.

In a nutshell, here is how I define this barrier:

The Collective IQ Barrier: The potential collective intelligence of a human group is exponentially proportional to group size, however in practice the actual collective intelligence that is achieved by a group is inversely proportional to group size. There is a huge delta between potential collective intelligence and actual collective intelligence in practice. In other words, when it comes to collective intelligence, the whole has the potential to be smarter than the sum of its parts, but in practice it is usually dumber.

Why does this barrier exist? Why are groups generally so bad at tapping the full potential of their collective intelligence? Why is it that smaller groups are so much better than large groups at innovation, decision-making, learning, problem solving, implementing solutions, and harnessing collective knowledge and intelligence? 

I think the problem is technological, not social, at its core. In this article I will discuss the problem in more depth and then I will discuss why I think the Semantic Web may be the critical enabling technology for breaking through the Collective IQ Barrier.

Diagram: Beyond Keyword (and Natural Language) Search

Here at Radar Networks we are working on practical ways to bring the Semantic Web to end-users. One of the interesting themes that has come up a lot, both internally, as well as in discussions with VC's, is the coming plateau in the productivity of keyword search. As the Web gets increasingly large and complex, keyword search becomes less effective as a means for making sense of it. In fact, it will even decline in productivity in the future. Natural language search will be a bit better than keyword search, but ultimately won't solve the problem either -- because like keyword search it cannot really see or make use of the structure of information.

I've put together a new diagram showing how the Semantic Web will enable the next step-function in productivity on the Web. It's still a work in progress and may change frequently for a bit, so if you want to blog it, please link to this post, or at least the .JPG image behind the thumbnail below so that people get the latest image. As always your comments are appreciated. (Click the thumbnail below for a larger version).

Today a typical Google search returns up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of results -- but we only really look at the first page or two of results. What about the other results we don't look at? There is a lot of room to improve the productivity of search, and the help people deal with increasingly large collections of information.

Keyword search doesn't understand the meaning of information, let alone its structure. Natural language search is a little better at understanding the meaning of information -- but it still won't help with the structure of information. To really improve productivity significantly as the Web scales, we will need forms of search that are data-structure-aware -- that are able to search within and across data structures, not just unstructured text or semistructured HTML. This is one of the key benefits of the coming Semantic Web: it will enable the Web to be navigated and searched just like a database.

Starting with the "data web" enabled by RDF, OWL, ontologies and SPARQL, structured data is becoming increasingly accessible, searchable and mashable. This in turn sets the stage for a better form of search: semantic search. Semantic search combines the best of keyword, natural language, database and associative search capabilities together.

Without the Semantic Web, productivity will plateau and then gradually decline as the Web, desktop and enterprise continue to grow in size and complexity. I believe that with the appropriate combination of technology and user-experience we can flip this around so that productivity actually increases as the size and complexity of the Web increase.

See Also: A Visual Timeline of the Past, Present and Future of the Web

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.

The Semantic Web is About Helping People Use the Web More Productively

I've been reading some of the further posts on various blogs in reaction to the Markoff article in the New York Times last Sunday. There is a tremendous amount of misconception about the Semantic Web-- as evidenced for example by Ross Mayfield's post recently. Ross implied that the Semantic Web is about automating the Web, rather than facilitating people. This is a misconception that others have taken to even further extremes -- some people have characterized it as an effort to replace humans, replace social networks and social software, etc. etc. That is simply NOT at all correct! Quite the opposite in fact.

The Semantic Web is just a way to augment and improve the EXISTING Web and all the existing relationships, groups, communities, social networks, user-experiences, apps, content, and online services on it. It doesn't replace the Web we have, it just makes it smarter. It doesn't replace human intelligence and decision-making, it just augments human thinking, so that individuals and groups can overcome the growing complexity of information overload on the Web.

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?

Interesting Idea: Start a Magazine that is a Wiki

I was reading this article in Wired magazine about wikis, where the article itself is a wiki that the readers can contribute to -- and an idea occurred to me. What if you could make an entire magazine that was in a fact a wiki? This magazine would be published online via a Website running a wiki engine. Every issue would be by and for the community of readers. There would be an editorial group among the readers that would decide what to write articles about for the next issue of the magazine, and then the community would work to write the articles. To get into the editorial group, remain there, and have a vote as an editor, a community member would have to make a certain number of (non-spurrious) contributions to articles on an ongoing basis (and/or maintain a certain reputation in the community as measured in some other manner).

I can imagine this idea taking off and a lot of these "wikazines" forming around various subject areas. It makes sense that communities of people who are interested in subjects could help to research and write about them. Of course in such communities there would be some people who put more effort in than others, and some who were more like readers or lurkers. But it would still be much more involving than old "one-way media."

In some ways communities like Digg simulate this -- people essentially vote on what is interesting and this filters up to become the featured content on the site. But that is still one step removed from the creative process itself -- only the readers participate, not the content authors. What's interesting about this proposal is that it blurs the distinction between an author and a reader, and provides a way for a magazine to be truly emergent and community-driven. OK, I'm too busy to start this, but I hope someone out there on the lazyweb takes this idea and runs with it. Please let me know if you find examples of this.

What is Radar Networks up to?

Shel Israel and I just finished up working together for 10 days. I needed Shel's perspective on what we are working on at Radar Networks. Shel lived up to his reviews as a brilliant thinker on strategic messaging, branding and positioning. So what are the 15 people at Radar Networks working on? It's still a secret, but yes, it's related to the Semantic Web, and yes, Shel has hinted on his blog at some of it. But it's probably not what you think. And, no, it's not semantic video blogging either. More hints later on. For now, if you are a blogger and you have a wish-list for what wikis or blogs could do next, feel free to submit your list in the comments on this post: I'm doing some informal market research...

[Corrected due to typo.]

Microsoft Photosynth is Incredible

Check out this video demo of Microsoft Photosynth -- an experimental technology that combines multiple photos of the same thing into a 3-D model that can then be navigated and explored -- it's beautiful, visionary and well... just awesome.

Polling the Global Mind

Grupthink is a service where anyone can create and participate in polls on various subjects. It's similar to an idea I once had about polling the global mind in real-time (although their system does not show votes happening in real-time, presently). It reminds me of several other Web 2.0 sites, but it's nicely done. Worth a look.

Cool Collective Intelligence Group Drawing Game

Check out The Broth -- it's a "global mosaic" in which you can move tiles around in real time with other people to create emergent artworks. It's really cool to watch images grow and morph from the combined imagination of people around the Net. Beautiful.

Harnessing The Collective Mind

Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times about a company called Rite-Solutions which is using a home-grown stock market for ideas to catalyze bottom-up innovation across all levels of personnel in their organization. This is a way to very effectively harness and focus the collective creativity and energy in an organization around the best ideas that the organization generates.

Using virtual stock market systems to measure community sentiment is not a new concept but it is a new frontier. I don't think we've even scratched the surface of what this paradigm can accomplish. For lots of detailed links to resources on this topic see the wikipedia entry on prediction markets. This prediction markets portal also has collected interesting links on the topic. Here is an informative blog post about recent prediction market attempts. Here is a scathing critique of some prediction markets.

There are many interesting examples of prediction markets on the Web:

• Google uses a similar kind of system -- their own version of a prediction market -- to enable staff members to collaboratively predict the likelihood that various internal projects and events will occur on-schedule.
• Yahoo also has a prediction market called BuzzGame that enables visitors to help predict technology trends. 
• Newsfutures Exchange is a prediction market about the news, which is powered by a commercial prediction market engine sold by a company called Newsfutures.
• BlogShares, a fantasy stock market for Weblogs in which players invest virtual money in the blogs they think will gain the most audience share.
• Intrade is another exchange for trading on idea futures.
• The Iowa Political Futures Exchange is a prediction market that focuses on political change.
• Tradesports is a prediction market around sports topics.
• The Hollywood Stock Exchange is a prediction market around movies.
• The Foresight Exchange is another prediction market for predicting future events.

Here are some interesting, more detailed discussions of prediction market ideas and potential features.

• http://hanson.gmu.edu/ideafutures.html
• http://hanson.gmu.edu/ifwired.html
• http://ideastockexchange.com/about.htm

Another area that is related, but highly underleveraged today, are ways to enable communities to help establish whether various ideas are correct using argumentation. By enabling masses of people to provide reasons to agree or disagree with ideas, and with those reasons as well, we can automatically rate what ideas are most agreed with or disagreed with. One very interesting example of this is TruthMapping.com. Some further concepts related to this approach are discussed in this thread.

The Semantic Web on Your Desktop -- Open IRIS Announced

Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart's pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS -- an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my own startup, Radar Networks, as well as other participating research organizations.

IRIS is designed to help users make better sense of their information. It can run on it's own, or can be connected to the CALO system which provides advanced machine learning capabilities to it. I am very proud to see IRIS go open source -- I think it has potential to become a major platform for learning applications on the desktop.

IRIS is still in its early stages of evolution, and much work will be done this year to add further functionality, improve the GUI and make IRIS even more user-friendly. But already it is perhaps the most sophisticated and comprehensive semantic desktop PIM ever created. If you would like to read more about IRIS, this paper provides a good overview.

Congratulations to the team at SRI for reaching this important milestone!

(Note: IRIS is a product of SRI. Radar Networks helps to develop IRIS, under subcontract to SRI, but our primary work is on our own commercial products, which have not yet been released, and which are not related to IRIS. Stay tuned.)

The World Wide Database -- Google Base Thoughts

I am playing around with the barely functional live beta of Google Base that just launched. There's not much there, but what I do see is interesting. At the very least this is going to be serious competition for Ning. Beyond that it may compete with Craigslist and other classifieds and events listing services. It's an interesting first step.

But I also see several potential major problems with the approach that Google Base  is taking -- in particular there does not seem to be any notion of real semantics under the hood. Is the data at least available as RDF? But even if it is -- how will it be integrated as everyone starts creating their own types? From what I can see, without data type standards, Google Base is likely to develop into billions of non-integrated data record types -- an unuseable "data soup." Searching across these non-normalized records will be next to impossible without an ontology or some form of higher-level data integration. I wonder if the folks at Google have thought this through? At my own startup, Radar Networks, we've spent several years exploring these issues in our own work and in our DARPA work -- all of which is centered around making use of richer semantics in applications. And we've built a working system that makes this much more practical. 

We believe that "the world wide database" requires the Semantic Web as its key enabling infrastructure. The technologies of the Semantic Web (RDF/OWL principally, and perhaps XML Topic Maps as well) enable a truly interoperable, open data exchange layer. From what I can see neither Ning nor Google see this, but they are interesting first steps at least. If anyone from Google or Yahoo is reading this, I would be interested in speaking further with you.

Update: Google has taken Google Base offline for a while it seems.  

The Future of the Web is Semantic

Here is a good article from IBM that provides decent, not-overly-technical, overview of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web, and the value they offer.

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.

Beautiful Idea: How to Program the Global Mind

I just read this really cool idea about how to design a programming language for the global brain -- think of it as grid computing, but where some of the agents in the grid are humans and others are computers, working together to solve problems. I've had similar ideas to this over the years, for example the use of collaborative networks to mark up and tag content on the Semantic Web, as well as various forms of expertise referral networks. What I like about this new proposal is that it suggests an actual language for writing global mind programs. That's a new angle. Brilliant.

Communities of Purpose: The Third Type of Community

I've been thinking about different types of communities recently. Two forms of community that are often discussed are "communities of interest" where the members share a common set of interests (e.g. a community of people interested in Japanese culture), and "communities of practice" where the members share a common set of skills (e.g. a community of marketing professionals). To these I would add a third type called a "community of purpose," where the focus is on a shared goal (e.g. a political activist community or a community collaborating on a common project). Most existing community tools today are either focused on building communities of interest or communities of practice. But I am more interested in creating tools that help people create more productive communities of purpose. To do this we need to merge the functionality of groupware and knowledge management with emerging community tools for social networking, blogging, and wikis.

(Note: Jason wrote in on April 12, 2005 to inform me of his previous blog posts about this concept, which he also called "communities of purpose" -- that not only makes him the originator of the term, but it also officially makes it a meme.)

Microsoft Buys Groove: No Big Deal

Microsoft announced that they are buying Groove Networks today, in a deal that has gotten some buzz. But I don't really think it's very significant given that Microsoft already had a large equity stake in Groove and has linked them into their apps for more than a year now. I've always been puzzled by the seeming contradiction between Groove and Netmeeting being in the same company as they are directly competitive offerings. But then again, I guess Microsoft can afford to not worry about details like that. In any case, I don't think this deal will make much of a difference for either company.

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.

My "A Physics of Ideas" Manifesto has been Published!

Change This, a project that helps to promote interesting new ideas so that they get noticed above the noise level of our culture has published my article on "A Physics of Ideas" as one of their featured Manifestos. They use an innovative PDF layout for easier reading, and they also provide a means for readers to provide feedback and even measure the popularity of various Manifestos. I'm happy this paper is getting noticed finally -- I do think the ideas within it have potential. Take a look.