Minding the Planet

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I think that interest networks can't replace blogs, because the purpose of blogs is much wider. On the other hand, the concrete purpose of interest networks could drive people to create more content since they provide a suitable place for small texts related to a web resource (something not so favored by the blog paradigm).

The activity done on interest networks has actually the same motivation as writing professional blog articles (combined with social bookmarking), but is just better supported there.

It would be nice to think of other uses of blogs, for which we could create separate services.

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Hi Nova,

So that's where your posts went...

This is a great post, showing how quickly Twine is progressing towards a unique value prop making use of the strength of semweb technologies and your engine. I particularly second your point on interest networks as a great evolution on social networks, and would encourage you to go down that road further, as I'm sure you do. The potential seems to be limitless, and it plays well to the strengths of semantic technologies.

Along those lines, here are a few suggestions for things I'd like to see in Twine, which in my eyes would add huge value to the app:

- The more you build on top of existing apps like Wordpress or Typepad, the better. I use Typepad too, and I'd like anything I type there to show up in my Twine blog, and vice-versa. An add-on to automate that in Typepad and Wordpress would be great in that regard. I have a feeling you're going to tell me this is already implemented...
- You may explore news way of displaying blogs in Twine, but please create an option to see your posts in the traditional display, with all your most recent posts already expanded, so I can take a quick look through as I did in Typepad. I haven't found such a view so far, maybe it's already in there.
- In the same vein, allowing me to link on LinkedIn and perhaps Facebook with my Twine contacts, to further the dialog to the social network arena, would really complement you. Like I believe you do, I don't think social networking threatens you, on the other hand, it really adds to the value of interest networking, and vice-versa.
- As a next step, I wonder how your technology could be used from step one in the creativity process, to facilitate the creation of blog posts itself. I can imagine that getting suggestions of existing pieces of tagged content as I type my post, would be a very useful thing to me and other bloggers.

If you allow me a short, related plug, I've recently gone independent after working as a marketing director in the semweb field, so if a go-to-market consultant would be something of use for Twine I'd be interested in helping out.

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Nova,

While I greatly adore Twine and have been a user for a while, I would contend that it is far from the ideal personal publishing platform for the average Joe.

Eventually, you can't tie context to any particular platform (blogger, typepad, twine etc), which is why we are creating this huge hoopla about RDF and the semantic web. The day will come when all those will become nodes that publish data that other nodes can subscribe to.

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Currently, with the social networking systems we have, the real comparison is not to cars but to railways.

The Web, the TCP/IP Internet and the public phone system are all like 'highways' in that you are free by design and law to use whatever 'vehicle' or client you want to navigate them.

But the social networks are privately owned spaces that by design (and sometimes law) only allow clients also owned by the Company to use them.

That's why there were so many monopolistic railway barons back in the nineteenth century. Like the social networking space (and the pre-Web Online Services before them, Compuserve and The WELL et al). The barriers to entry were huge, and the single provider controlled *both* the client experience AND the content. When the content is people, of course, as it is for communication and transport, you really do have a 'captive market'.

The car analogy only comes into play *after* you have created a freely and legally interoperable shared data space. That's not something that's hugely important for a free society, but will happen if people realise they need it and make it happen.

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Hmmm...so if it can affect the behavioral patterns of a growing foetus just by calling your loved ones and friends ONLY 3 TIMES a day...and being at least half a meter away from the offending device, what about the behavioural problems mobile phones cause to children, adolescents and adults who have their ears ( and just behind their ears their brains ) glued to the damn thing morning, noon and night ? That would seem to be equally important, potentially more damaging and definitely worth warning everyone too !!! I Guess unborn babies don't pay phone bills...so that makes it OK to publish this stuff...!!!

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Good idea. But, somehow I still cannot agree to the concept of wars and using devices of mass destruction. In my opinion, the act of a war by any govt. is no different from the act of terrorism unleashed by damn fools like Osama Bin Laden. The priority should be to eradicate the use of the legitimacy of the govt. to wage acts of terrorism.

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I strongly agree that the world should research oil alternatives. We should take this issue very seriously. However the article simplifies many political and economical problems into an oil issue. I would like to comment that the Middle East problems (and thus the problem of the world’s political peace and economical instability) are mostly caused the illegitimate existence of Israel. The oil is a motivation rather directly the cause of the problems. Israel was injected inside the body of the Arabs courtiers, not because of the oil. Instead of killing the Jewish, as the Germany did, UK decided to throw them out of Europe, and the best is to position them between Europe and Arabs, used like a wall. Of course in order for Israel to keep all support from Europe and the USA, oil is used as a motivation rather than a direct cause (the conflict with Iraq and Iran are examples). Although Sudam accepted to give the Iraqi oil to the USA with very cheap price, in order to stay in power, but the USA refused this because the Israeli lobby in the Wight House wanted to destroy Iraq for the advantage of Israel. Same motivation will be used for Iran, etc.
such conflicts are creating strong resistance by the Arab people (not the governments, which are little toys, installed and maintained by the USA). Sometimes this resistance has leftish faces (1960-1980), and sometimes has other religious faces (1990- ). I do expect the next face will be more nationalistic-revolutionary face. In other words, whatever the face of the resistance, the cause is stays the same: Israel. To be more precise, the history shows that they weren’t any conflict between the Jewish and the Arabs. The conflict is not with the (Jewish), it is with the Israel and any country supporting it.

Another issue, I am really against that some courtiers get very cheap oil, like the USA or even the golf countries. When I see people driving big cars (because the oil in their countries is very cheap) I wonder how their governments think!! Cheap oil means more consumption….

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Hi Nova,

thanks for answering my question "Can you imagine the future of the world (wide Web) without the Semantic Web?" in the exact way I wanted to hear ;)

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Hello Nova,

I am watching your talk right now on the web. Fascinating stuff. Wonderful to have found your blog and to get introduced to your ideas and visions.
In the talk you say that your slides will be on your blog: I have searched for them and I am miserable because it would either mean I don't have the intelligence to locate them, or - even worse - they are not there. The Horror...
Could you do something?

Thanks and all the best from Denmark,
Anders

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am glad to meet you. when people start to think about integral solution there will be no place for conflicts. The question weather governments are ready to release power of lobby and build bottom-up tipping synergy?

Personally I am pushing for the spirit of "Integral Palestine" settled by "Global Palestine Generation"

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another thing ... when a person or a country defines themself in terms of an opposite, then to make peace with that opposite is hugely threatening to the original identity and is to be avoided at all cost. israel has to oppose palestine or it wont be israel, literally, ontologically

fossil fuels are not a problem, it is the inablity to expand one's identity to include a larger we.

how to do that is nearly a metaphysical problem

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good comment ... though up 'til now i have never encountered a government or an organization that will do what it should do, they only do what will maintain the status quo .... it is a very rare trait in individuals, as well

israel, notice how the first meeting obama had after his speech was with aipac? forget any change there

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Very very wise words, thank you for writing them.

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Great vision, Nova. The good point with renewable energies, which generally come out of the flow of photons from the sun, is that you cannot consume today the flow of tomorrow, then you cannot steal next generations’ piece of the cake.

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Hi Nova, I loved your presentation. thank you so much for being at The Next Web. Hope you and your partner enjoyed it as well and will be back next year

Patrick

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This is the proposal from the British government as part of the treaty.
"— Britain also argues for exemption of the M85 because of its “self-deactivation device”. Such “smart cluster bombs” are said to have a failure rate of 1 per cent"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3818771.ece

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It'd be great when this interoperability becomes a reality. But who knows when that'll be.

While we're holding our breath for it... anthoer related question is - "how can one best organize/manage one's online presense given so many choices of outlets"?

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It'd be great when this interoperability becomes a reality. But who knows when that'll be.

While we're holding our breath for it... another related question is - how can one best organize/manage one's online presence given so many choices of outlets?

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Whilst I have no particular axe to grind on Semantic vs. semantic, we're beginning to build systems that are constructed from the ground up using semantics (with a big 'S' I guess). Now RDF, RDFS, OWL and the like are rather useful for doing that kind of thing, so I applaud Nova's enthusiasm - but until I can offer my clients Semantic Web capabilities for virtually nothing, they will not do much for the cause... If we begin to build systems using these standards though, perhaps they could get such capabilities for almost free?

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I'm not buying this one. I do have two children with developmental issues, and with one I NEVER used a cell (didn't even own one) and with the other it was rare. This is the same freakout that occurred over microwave ovens. I'm more concerned about the power lines all over my yard that the kids are exposed to constantly than my cell.

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While this is certainly a huge deal if indeed cell phone radiation is harmful, It is worth highlighting that the scientists...
"...add that there might be other possible explanations that they did not examine – such as that mothers who used the phones frequently might pay less attention to their children – and stress that the results "should be interpreted with caution" and checked by further studies."

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Nova,

Social Networks, like Shared Bookmarking systems, Blogs, Wikis etz.. all fall into the same category (in my eyes): Data Spaces on the Web.

They all end up exposing data access via APIs (SOAP or REST), eventually; which makes them no different than a traditional DBMS with a Call Level Interface (a native OS locked API for a specific DBMS).

Linked Data enables Virtualization across these Data Spaces. Which is basically what OpenLink Data Spaces is about (by leveraging our Virtuoso Virtualization engine for SQL, XML, and RDF). Just get a URI and point the ODS platform to all you Data Spaces on the Web, that's it, and from that point onwards, your URI becomes your "Data Source Name" (DSN).

All that I described above has worked fine within the old Client-Server realm of the enterprise for eons, pre-Web ubiquity. The same rules apply to the Web courtesy of Linked Data, but with the added advantage of the mass connectibvity that the Web accords and the level of data granularity that Linked Data facilitates.

Links:

1. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/GetAPersonalURIIn5MinutesOrLess - Get a URI in 5 Minutes or Less
2. http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/presentations/DataPortability_and_DataSpaces-2.ppt - OpenLink Data Spaces & Data Portability

Kingsley

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I think you're smack on.

Reading this made me think of an old blog post of my own - I'm waiting for the Trillian of social networking - from 2004, which was pretty much along the same lines.

Probably the most interesting bit, reading it again now is to see how much things have changed in both the IM and the Social Networking space. Facebook and MySpace didn't really exist, and who on earth remembers Trillian anymore?

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Ning comes to mind, as does Yahoo Groups: Each is a platform for social networks.

Chris Saad will have his hands full, to be sure. Let's face it, some of the larger players will want to have a wall. Maintaining a wall may not be doable in the long(er)-term, but may allow certain dominant players to increase their market share (and mind share) while interoperability and portability issues are finally (re)solved.

But this poses an interesting question for Twine. A couple of twines have 1,000+ members (not including the Twine twines): Web 3.0, Apps. Each could, in theory, be its own social network. This hasn't happened yet, but we should explore ways to make it happen, you Radarians with your Web 3.0 twine, myself with my Apps twine.

On a small scale, QBL serves this function, as do many private twines. But for 1,000+ "social networks," a different approach is likely needed. However, they're still a far cry from the likes of MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn in numbers. Yet, 1,000 would be a lot for a Yahoo Group or Ning -- and Twine, still in a private beta, already has two twines with over 1,000 members (mine is approaching 1,500 and is pretty much self-sustaining at this point). But how do we convert Web 3.0 and Apps to a true social network? Or, do we even want to do this?

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How's this for an argument, Nova: What's important is the "semantic web," NOT necessarily the "Semantic Web."

In other words, what is most important is that something works, something provides a solution, something meets a consumer/customer need. The "Semantic Web" will eventually help with interoperability. This is important, to be sure.

But with hosted SaaS solutions, as long as there is a SOA framework for integrating SaaS solutions with siloed packaged software, then everything is (mostly) on the right track.

Sure, the Semantic Web as standards does help, but I wonder (and question) whether such standards are as necessary with SaaS solutions.

The other thing that concerns me is that standards move slower than a tree grows. I've had the unfortunate experience (actually, it was kind of fun, but not terribly productive) to sit on some IEEE standards committees. The technology was at least a few years ahead of the corresponding standards. Interoperability was the key issue. But if someone wants a solution that doesn't necessarily have to be integrated with their existing solutions, or if they can apply "SOA 101" and create a workable solution, isn't the "semantic web" (as a solution) being impeded by the "Semantic Web" (as standards)? Just a thought.

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