Here's a new take on a well known saying I like....

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.

Scott Adams, Dogbert; Dilbert cartoons
US cartoonist (1957 - )

Radar Networks' Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload

Here's a more detailed description of what Twine is about and it seems to me an improvement over what we've seen so far in social networking tools.

Nova Spivack thinks it's high time we make computers smart enough to manage the ocean of scattered information our digital lives create.

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Friday, Spivack will officially take Radar Networks, the start-up he co-founded, out of stealth mode and show off Twine, a Web service for managing information, using your social network and the Semantic Web.

With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add to that collection. People can e-mail items into Twine, bookmark Web pages or upload documents. To add tags, people fill in a form.

The software is smart enough to create tags itself after mining through the content, which can be text, audio or video. It also taps into the collective knowledge of Wikipedia to categorize information.

Radar Networks' Twine service for managing Web info and collaborating.

Under the covers, Radar Network's server is using natural language processing and Semantic Web technology to get a better idea of the meaning of a person's collected information.

"This is the user experience side of the Semantic Web," said Spivack. "Our motto is 'people are lazy.' Who wants to spend their time being a librarian?...That's what we made computers for."

The idea behind the Semantic Web is that Web content has embedded data that allows applications to "talk" to each other. With that self-describing information, summed up in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format, software agents can act on information, making life easier for Web users.

Spivack said that the Twine "knowledge networking" service really shines when used for collaboration. People can share information on a certain subject and get notifications when someone in their social network posts something new. The more information Twine gathers, the better it gets at recommendations and understanding a user's preferences.

Radar Networks' plan is to offer a free service that is advertising-supported and to introduce a line of premium services, which would be more geared toward business users.

Also in store are a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will let outside developers write applications on its platform. Spivack said that Radar Networks intends to follow the same strategy that Salesforce.com has in building its online development platform AppExchange, which provides a foundation for building third-party applications.

The Radar Networks platform is based on Web standards RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language), which means that information can be transported into another service, says Spivack.

Twine.com

is the name of the just launched site by Radar Networks  at Web2.0 Summit and it claims to be a Revolutionary Semantic Web Application. Having followed the company and their CEO Nova Spivack for some time, I believe this to be an exciting new development in what's coming next on the web - also called web 3.0 by some, a new term that will most likely be as controversial and misunderstood as web 2.0 is by many today.



I can't imagine that this kind of technology will not have an impact on travel, at least as significant as the web 2.0 tools are having at present. In addition the semantic web promises to affect and even transform collaboration even more than web 2.0 has done.

Information R/evolution

Embedded Video a fascinating video about what's happening all around us with information and how  it is used, absorbed, changed, improved, collected, spread and on and on.....

It's a great take on the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

Very insightful commentary

by Nova Spivak Understanding The Semantic Web: A Response to Tim O'Reilly's Recent Defense of Web 2.0 on his Minding the Planet blog. As he states, it's too early to tell how the next phase in the development of the web will shake out but it promises to be exciting to say the least.

 

Enemybook and Snubster anyone?

Here comes the antidote to all those friends requests that you might not really want to accept sometimes, New Facebook Apps That Explore Dark Side of Relationships let you start an enemy list. How about that for making a statement of being less than in a social mood sometimes and keep certain people at arms length....!

And the founder of Enemybook already was interviewed on NPR's Day to Day program. Try getting that exposure with your plain vanilla app!

 

Predictions are hard, especially those about the future!

Today's Web 3.0 Nonsense Blogstorm  

• The debate about what's coming next on the web is on and the terminology is as controversial as ever!


• The numbers game might well be on the way out.


• The heavyweights are weighing in what it's about.