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30 October 2007

Nodalities now on the Semantic Web

GRDDL Last week Masahide Kanzaki kindly provided the code to allow This Week's Semantic Web to be interpreted as Semantic Web data. The code was XSLT, which is supported by GRDDL, the new W3C specification for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages. Following a minor addition to this blog systems template, the posts here can now be automatically intepreted as RDF by GRDDL-aware agents. These currently include Tabulator and the OpenLink RDF Browser (here showing the discovery of 556 triples from a single blog post).

As an experiment, I've also created a GRDDL profile which provides RDF statements for every link in a HTML document. When defined as a profile, only a very small addition is needed to a HTML document (which should be valid XHTML) for it to be GRDDLable. The addition for this particular profile looks like this: 


 ...
   <head profile="http://purl.org/stuff/glink/">
 ...

Now all the posts here expose explicit data on the Semantic Web.

Other profiles and transformations (several corresponding to popular microformats) can be found at CustomRdfDialects on the ESW Wiki.

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29 October 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-10-29, all weeks.

This Week's Semantic Web is now available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL, courtesy Kanzaki (discussion)

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

Formal semantics - formal methods generally - are valuable, but they should be our servants rather than our masters.

- Pat Hayes

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

24 October 2007

Issue 2 of the Semantic Report now available

Scott Koegler's regular newsletter goes from strength to strength, with issue 2 now available online.

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Web 2.0 Summit - reflections after a trans-Atlantic flight and a day off!

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Last week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was pretty intense, all things considered. It's therefore lucky that this week is the Half Term school holiday in this particular corner of the UK, and peppered with days off to do various non-work things.

During the conference (sorry, 'summit') I managed to live-blog most of the sessions I attended, and the corpus can be found here. O'Reilly/CMP are also doing a great job of getting session videos up.

Now I've had time to reflect without the need to type and listen and keep an eye on the office, what were the trends and highlights for me?

I noticed two big switches since 2005 when I last attended this particular gathering. Firstly, although I didn't see much evidence of a credible alternative, there was far less of an assumption that Google AdWords were the business model of choice. And secondly the lobby conversations just seemed much less desperate than last time, when everyone and everything was frenetically for sale.

The iPhone was everywhere. I saw lots of people using Apple's latest, but don't think I saw anyone actually talking into the thing, which means that Nokia's phone-less (?) alternative may do well. We get iPhones in the UK in a couple of weeks, and Talis will be raffling one at our conference the week before that launch. Something tells me that my chances of winning that iPhone are about as high as those for Nokia to send me an N810.

There seemed less of an emphasis upon scheduled evening entertainment than previously. Richard MacManus comments on this, too. From my perspective it was a good thing, as it made my packed schedule of dinner engagements (and a trip to a real San Francisco home) so much easier to manage. In many ways, these (including one with Mr MacManus) were the highlight of the trip.

The main auditorium was a truly unpleasant place to spend time; way too crowded. The overflow room upstairs was a far better bet, complete with comfy sofas, power, wifi (which you could also get downstairs, if your battery was up to the job), and easy access to food and drink. It would have been nice to be able to ask questions with a video link to the sweatshopauditorium downstairs that was bi-directional, though. A second display showing the whole stage would also have been good. The main monitor kept zooming in to provide detail on faces/slides etc; it wasn't always focussed on the thing I considered important.

So what about the meat?

Well, in case you hadn't noticed, Facebook is going to be big. I don't just mean suggestions that Zuckerberg may be 'selling himself short' at a mere $15bn, or evidence that Facebook's platform is delivering profit for third party developers. More than both of those, there was an underlying - often implicit - recognition that growth opportunities lie in pushing content and functionality off our individual websites and into the cloud. Although I've argued before that Facebook is a very long way from being open, it's 'Platform' remains a compelling example of ways in which external content can be aggregated and consumed elsewhere. Imagine what would be possible in a more open ecosystem, an ecosystem of which Facebook could be a part? Were others (MySpace, anyone?) to seed such an ecosystem whilst Facebook remained off to one side, would the rate of fall in Facebook numbers equal or exceed their recent growth?

'Semantic' has arrived; the Metaweb/ Radar Networks/ Powerset pow wow with Tim O'Reilly (pictured) on the final afternoon was great, and was just beginning to go places when they ran out of time. More debate and analysis would have been nice, with (a lot) less demo. This was followed up by John Doerr recognising the whole space as a compelling investment opportunity, echoing trends that Brad Feld highlighted in his recent podcast with me. I found Danny Hillis' explicit distancing of himself from the Semantic Web odd (Shelley just found it funny...); I'll admit that I've done a little of the same, but more to demonstrate that there is plenty that the Semantic Web's building blocks (RDF, GRDDL, etc) can do right now, without needing to await the arrival of The Semantic Web. We do need to find better ways to describe this space, though; 'Web 3.0' can be unnecessarily confrontational/epochal, and 'Semantic Web' carries way too much baggage...

Jonathan Zittrain had some interesting things to say, and they're not nearly as contrarian as they might at first have appeared.

Mary Meeker was good value, as always... although impossible to blog! I was surprised by the lack of reaction to her figures illustrating the fall in US growth, relative to competitors to the east.

The Launch Pad, that gathering of exemplary startups, was hugely disappointing. I can't believe that was the cream of the crop.

Gene sequencing needs to be watched... very closely.

Real people don't think (quite) like geeks and venture capitalists! Craigslist, rejoice...

(Almost) everyone had a Platform, with some more black hole sucking-ish than others. It does appear, all too often, that the web is actually becoming less open than it has been of late. All these Platforms are sucking data and users and developers to themselves, and letting very little flow back out. It certainly fulfils short-term goals around eyeballs, advertisers, and the like. But it's bad for the web and, in the long term, it's got to be bad for (most of?) the guilty.

(Almost) everyone was recognising the power of intention/attention, and seeking ways to implicitly or explicitly harness both. Social and semantic graphs have something to say, here.

Photograph © James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media

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22 October 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-10-22. All weeks.

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

Kids Special

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

20 October 2007

Web 2.0 Summit - John Doerr

John Doerr
John Doerr is up for the last session of the conference (except the drinks).

John B - “when you invested in Google, did you have any idea of where this would go?”

John D - “No”

John B - “do you worry that the company is trying to do too many things?”

John D - “No.” Google is about ads, and about applications. [what, no search?] 70/10/20 - ads, search, applications. Over 100million downloads of Google toolbar.

John B - “what do you worry about?”

John D - “keeping the quality of the culture” as the company grows rapidly.

John B - “why didn't you invest in Facebook?”

John D - loyalty. We'd backed Friendster, and we don't back competitors. Friendster is the number 13 web site by traffic, and it's growing. Number 3 in China.

Talking about Green issues... and the scale of the problem. Can't wait to see what innovative disruptors in the room do about it.

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Web 2.0 Summit - the Semantic Edge

Sw-Rubik

And now, the panel I've been waiting for. Tim O'Reilly takes to the stage with three early examples of real companies betting the farm on semantic technologies. Danny Hillis of Metaweb [listen to the podcast with his Minister of Information, with whom Ian and I had a great dinner last night], Barney Pell of Powerset and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks [who also did a podcast with us, is a member of our Advisory Group, and launched twine last night...]

Tim - “Web 2.0 is all about collective intelligence. The Semantic Web is all about collective intelligence too”.

“There's something really interesting cooking - platforms for building intelligent applications.”

Before discussion, demo...

Freebase-Venturespin-1

Visualising the data in Freebase... “An extreme example of opening up access to data”.

“Because this is an application based on this open database [Freebase], if I find a piece of information that's missing, then I can add that information”. “All applications that use Freebase are smarter because of that one correction”.

“Freebase is not just about people; it has geographical stuff, media stuff, sports...”

Freebase offers a free api so that people can use this data. Eg open source code on Google Code that allows any text box on any website to look up Freebase for text completion...

Powerset-Splash

Powerset building a natural language search. Reads every document, page by page, and builds a more powerful search. eg “Politicians who were killed by disease” - document may not mention a person as a politician, and may not say 'disease'; look-ups into (their copy of?) Freebase etc able to work out that 'Edward Heath' was a politician, and 'pneumonia' was a disease.

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Similar example here on Flickr... uploaded by Powerset.

Twine-Screen-1

And now Nova is up to show twine. Information is out of control. Information overload. Things are not connected. Collaboration is more complex.

There must be a better way, and there is; twine. For the end-user side of the Semantic Web. Lets you share, organise, and find information.

Now showing twine...

As the user uses twine, it builds a profile of you and your interests; identifying people, places, etc. Created by you, and by your friends and peers.

A twine is a place. Everyone gets their own private twine. You can also make twines for groups, teams, networks.

Semantic graph powers twine; the social graph is people and relationships. The semantic graph is everything.

Create a note. Twine reads it, and recognises people, places, organisations etc in the text... tagging the content with semantic tags automatically.

Twine provides simple browser bookmarklet to add objects into twine as you browse the web. Tries to extract structure from the page... Also capability to 'twine' emails.

“Databases don't have to be in one place” anymore.

When twine sees a url, it mines and crawls the site and infers which things are the most useful to recommend ; “a user-generated bottom-up crawl of the web”

Google is about organising the world's information. twine is about organising your information.

Everything in twine is shareable and editable. All permissions-based.

Important concept in twine is using tags to search and find things. It's not just a tag, it's a semantic tag; linked to concepts.

We analyse properties of the semanti graph to find things that are most interesting for you, based upon your background, your connections, etc.

Peter Rip [Radar investor] doing his due diligence in twine.

Marketing team using twine to leverage the collective knowledge of the group.

Now questions from Tim. “Can we get our hands on this stuff today? What's the real state of availability of semantic technologies today?”

Danny Hillis - “Don't necessarily characterise our stuff as Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was a particular case of a way to try to do things a few years ago”

Tim - “semantics ties these things together; there's meaning in this data. I'd always thought that was one of the things about Web 2.0 too... eg Pagerank - links having an additional level of meaning... Flickr 'interestingness', etc. The difference is that in Web 2.0 startups it's tacit, and hidden and proprietary. What you're doing is making this structure of meaning explicit, and portable, and usable by other applications; you're all platform plays.”

Danny - “about connections between things”... leads to“ network effect in value”. Silos don't make sense.

Tim - you're all extracting entities. Do you all have to do it yourselves.

Nova - open standards, a la W3C. The semantic web as a concept means a certain set of open standards. There are semantic technologies that don't necessarily support them. If you want an open network effect you have to support open standards.

Danny - we're not all reinventing things. We're not all re-extracting it.

Barney - Freebase is generally about people creating content. Powerset is about machines making implicit meaning already in text explicit.

Danny - Freebase is explicitly designed to be used through other applications. Barney's demonstration, for example, was another application using Freebase data.

Nova - people can create everything, or machines can create everything. Or there's something in the middle harnessing the wisdom of machines to the wisdom of crowds. That's what's interesting.

Nova - With the semantic web, the data becomes portable and connectable - the web of data. This notion of a database, and this notion of a Platform is changing. The web is the platform, the web is the database.

Danny - I'm saying WE are the Platform...

And it's a wrap.

Tim - “I think there's really something here”

Tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation of the new semantic web logo from W3C by Laurian Gridinoc...

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19 October 2007

Web 2.0 Summit - the forgotten generation

Panels with groups of real users are an interesting fixture at Web 2.0; I really enjoyed the teens back in 2005. This year, six baby boomers.

A mix of experience; from a woman who has been using the internet for about a year to a man who has been online for over a decade.

What search engines do you use?

Google, Yahoo!, Ask (in that order of preference).

“And craigslist” :-)

Google is 'easier' because there are 'less graphics'. Also works very well for maps.

Interesting perception of the appearance of ads in search results... panellists believe there are paid ads embedded in the results... and they don't like them.

Also not keen on ads on web pages.

Do you ever click on the ads?

Yes, but not often. ('not often' is probably often enough for the advertisers!)

A perception that having too many ads on a page leads them to simply ignore all of them... That makes sense; I wonder if there are figures to back that up?

What is your relationship with craigslist?

“I love it”

“Addiction”

“I just can't stop reading... I'm so much more educated because of craigslist”

“I look at it every day”

“I couldn't live without my cellphone or craigslist”

Would you pay for craigslist?

Yup - $10-20 or more a month

Have you heard of...?

Myspace? all

Facebook - most

Slide - a few

Joost - two

Wikipedia - most

Yell - most

delicious - none

YouTube - most

digg - none

Zillow - about half.

What comes to your mind when I mention...?

Google - helpful, information, a wonderful culture, maps, news, money, way too powerful, they could save your life, interesting, useful

Microsoft - most important company for software, they've always been there, you can't use anything else on a PC, Microsoft is great

Yahoo! - hmm... “I believe they just eliminated their photo storage”, “their mail service... I go to open it up in the morning, and get hit by an ad”

Apple - understated sometimes, iPhone

Moving on to cellphones... do any of you use them for anything other than making/receiving calls?

Texting... We find out on our cellphone that we've got an email...

What's your biggest beef about the internet?

Pop-up ads. information overload (“sometimes I put a word in, and I get a whole bunch of stuff”)

Tell me what the Internet is for you...

“It's a way of life” There's so much out there. It's going to something directly.

“We can't live without it”

“It's the convenience of being able to communicate with family and friends... even to another country”

“Convenience of shopping at home”

“It's a resource. It's a way to communicate. Thanks Craig”

What about fun? Do you have fun on the Internet?

YouTube.

Do you use NetFlix?

Some do. Some don't. One just cancelled it.

“A little cumbersome” Rent movies on demand over cable/satellite instead...

“Easier” to go to Blockbuster.

What about music? Have you downloaded music?

“Yes - visit a lot of sites. Buy music online.”

“Like listening to international music from other countries...”

“My kids taught me how to download onto an mp3 player”

e-Commerce - other than craigslist, where else do you shop?

eBay. “an endless supply of everything”

OverStock.com.

How much of your christmas shopping will you do online?

About 30%

50%

This will be my first year, but I'll do most of my shopping on the internet. The malls are mostly for teenage kids now.

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Web 2.0 Summit - Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon

LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon from SixApart are up next, talking about control of the social graph.

Lots of social networks exist, some of which (like dopplr) are tightly focussed upon a single use case. But they all need access to the social graph in order to be of value. Traditionally, they have had to ask the user to repopulate their social graph each time they join a new site, and this is 'frustrating'.

Analogy of the IM wars... Adium, Trillium etc not real solutions... they're a (useful) kludge. Arrival of more open solutions like Jabber.

Silos of identity, too - to which OpenID is a partial solution.

“Either social networks will keep their walls up to force individuals to choose, or the will open up in the hope that they'll get the customer even if their competitor does too” (quoting O'Reilly Radar)

“Open Data is increasingly important as services move online” (quoting Tim O'Reilly). Too right. Hence our interest...

The social graph (who my friends are) should be mine, and not controlled by Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace, etc.

“I want to get to the point that a social networking site cannot come about without supporting a data interchange format... and I think there's hope”

Need to put the user in control, and offer FOAF, RSS, Atom etc to export.

...but privacy matters.

OAuth possibly an emerging standard; your “valet key for the web”

TypePad and MovableType to add XFN support.

Real-time stream of relationship changes - updates.elsewhere.im/ - LiveJourna;, Magnoloa, Plaxo, hi5, smugmug, VOX, etc.

“Let's all open the social graph together”

Update: more on Radar

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Web 2.0 Summit - Stewart Butterfield of Flickr

Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield is up on stage, reporting on recent developments at Flickr.

15.4 million registered users. 38 million unique visitors, 1.38 billion photos. 5-15 million new photos a day.

Previewing a replacement for existing geotagging service...

115,000 geotagged photos per day, one every 1.3 seconds.

Merge tagging and locations to deliver a new ui that scales better to handle growth in usage.

“But there's more...”

Current 'interestingness' algorithm for photos can also be applied to the geolocation, creating pages of 'iconic' images at a given location.

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Web 2.0 Summit - Paul Kedrosky

Paul Kedrosky
Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky is up on stage with Tim O'Reilly in the post-lunch slot, talking about “Web 2.0 and Wall Street”

Tim - “Web 2.0 is really about collective intelligence, where the intelligence is driven by the network... Financial markets are really like that too, and have been doing it a lot longer.”

Paul - a lot of different applications that cross from finance to the social space - eg intrade or MarketWatch.

Paul - “stock markets are social networks”. eg stockpickr.

Paul - interesting to see ways of extracting 'alpha' (something differentiating) from contextual data - eg altos, weatherbill, etc harvesting freely available data and using aggregations to power prediction. Importance, too, of increasingly real-time access to the data.

“The future always comes too fast, and in the wrong order” (Tim, quoting Alvin Toffler)

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Web 2.0 Summit - Video at the Edge

Om Malik
Om Malik, Joel Hyatt (Current TV), Mike Volpi (Joost) on stage to discuss video.

Joel - many of you believe tv is dead. If it were, the average American wouldn't watch 4 hours a day. And if it were, Joost and others wouldn't be working so hard to bring tv to the internet. “I don't think tv is dead, I just think most of it sucks.”

“At Current TV, we wanted to bring the magic of the internet to tv, not the dumbness of tv to the internet”

Current TV has viewer-created adverts... and their users prefer those ads to the official ones.

This week, Current TV launched current.com - “an entirely new form of social media”; members can shape the content as it is assembled... and affect the content that they end up viewing on the television.

Mike - “most of you have probably heard of Joost”. Yup. Free to the user, but ad-supported.

Om - “the two of you have distinctly different approaches to television”

Mike - use an application now, because they wanted a rich full-screen experience. Would not rule out an in-browser solution.

Just because you can watch a film on your mobile phone doesn't mean it's a good experience.

Advertising becoming more important - but it has to be well targeted... and relevant. Opt-in also has a role to play, and advertisers will pay a premium for that.

Om - a lot of Joost's 'produced' content is from content owners' archive. What is the value of the archive?

Mike - Low cost to Joost to deliver the content. Low return to content owner per old programme, but better than not receiving anything for the archive as you do just now. Need to take a risk and put their newer content online too.

Lunch!

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Web 2.0 Summit - Big Media: Friend or Foe? panel

Josh Quittner (Fortune), Amy Banse (Comcast), Quincy Smith (CBS) now on stage for a discussion about Big Media.

Where are they going, and what are they up to?

Josh - “Joking that we're being set up to be the 'march of the dinosaurs'”

Josh - blogosphere bubbling about story that Comcast has been disrupting p2p traffic.

Amy - “I don't personally manage the pipe”, but there is a reality of 'excessive use'. 99.99...% of customers happily and reliably use the Comcast service every day. 0.01% abuse that service through excessive use. We need to manage that, and ensure that resources are available to the majority.

Josh - “paint a picture of 2 users... Danny (his brother in law) lives in Boston. He's the beginning of something. He's just purchased 50” flat panel display. Without a huge amount of sophistication, he attached Mac, XBox, cable box to the display, and gives access to his world. Om Malik is the other; gave up his cable service, and instead went for a broad broadband connection... VoIP, video on demand, etc. He gets it all off the network. Aren't we going to move from the former to the latter over the next few years, and how can CBS/Comcast/etc respond to these more sophisticated users...?“

Amy - not sure that Om Malik is typical. People in this room aren't typical either. ”We love the Internet“, but ”We love cable television... and it's going to be around for a while“

Quincy - vast majority of current audience in US. Opportunities to reach new eyeballs. Internet is not cannibalistic to television. 2 minutes of CSI viewed in another context is actually a great advert. Internet used first and foremost to reach new eyeballs.

Amy - ”tv viewing has gone up every year for the past thirty years“. Huh? I had assumed it was in decline. You learn something every day...

Amy - ”Comcast as... aggregator and distributor of video“, regardless of where the content lives and how it's delivered.

Josh - ”are you worried about Google?“

Amy - ”you want me to be a dinosaur running scared, but I'm not“. Looking at ways to partner with Google.

Josh - ”let's talk about social networks“

Quincy - ”social network as water cooler“. A broadcaster cannot just broadcast their content. They have to be part of the conversation. And need to find ways to monetise it. Last.fm a water cooler play... feed the water coolers (Facebook, Last.fm, MySpace) with content, and make it easy to have the conversation... and to link back to CBS content, CBS ads, etc.

Amy - ”social networks are a huge opportunity. Ability to access concentrated fans is something we should all look to exploit.“

Much talk about creating short clips from existing properties, pushing those online, and drawing viewers back to the 'normal' programme and its ads...

Quincy - ”People don't want to stream full episodes all day long on their PCs...“

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Web 2.0 Summit - Conversation with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson

Randall Stephenson
John Battelle is now on stage, interviewing AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson. Wonder how long until one mentions the iPhone...

It took about 17 minutes...

Much other discussion of the US network market... which seems a wee bitty behind the global curve.

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Web 2.0 Summit - Panel session on mapping at the edge

Brady Forrest
Brady Forrest is convening a panel on mapping; Eric Jorgensen from MS Virtual Earth, Brian McClendon from Keyhole/Google, Bruce Radloff from TeleAtlas.

Brady - everyone's familiar with your mapping products, but who pays for the data?

Eric - we do. We buy data from a lot of different sources.

Brady - so you're funding all the mashups out there?

Eric/Brian - yup.

Microsoft, Google, and others 'driving the streets' themselves, as well as buying data from third parties.

Eric - major update to 2D and 3D products this week.

Microsoft and Google both now supporting spatial search of geocoded (KML etc) web results, too.

Eric - “we can fight for customers, but competing on file formats just doesn't make sense”

Brady - what about ads on maps?

Brian - some experiments around ad sense, but still not clear how you ensure that 'advertising on maps is an improvement over the base map'.

Eric - 'location can be a form of contextual relevance', so knowing that a Home Depot is at a point on a map can actually help the user to work out where they are.

Ranking? - Brian... it's really hard with geodata, and we're not there yet.

Discussing issues of providing access to data globally - different laws, different availability, etc.

Brady - OpenStreetMap one of largest open data projects. Would you use their data?

Brian - we're watching, but they've a long way to go.

Eric - over time, the community can help to improve data. Seen as an either/or, I don't think it's ever going to be just one (commercial like TeleAtlas) or the other (OpenStreetMap etc).

Back after the coffee break...

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Web 2.0 Summit - Rob Currie and Mark Williamson from Dash

Rob Currie
Dash are 'building the world's first connected navigation platform'.

Mobile gps device, connects to the Internet over wifi and over cellphone network. Live traffic data from road sensors, etc. Your own device also reports back the driving conditions that it is experiencing, anonymously crowd-sourcing traffic data above and beyond the usual official sources.

Device updates itself with new points of interest etc.

Relationship with Yahoo!, to integrate search into the device.

Announcing today... mydash capability to subscribe to any KML/GeoRSS feed, and send data from the Web to your device. That's impressive...

Also Zillow integration. Is this whole city obsessed by real estate?

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Web 2.0 Summit - Jane McGonigal

Jane Mcgonigal
Jane McGonigal from the Institute for the Future is now on stage, talking about the next generation of gaming.

How can games help connect gamers with a 'better' reality?

For many gamers, “reality is broken”. Games are designed to make it easy to form relationships, and to build connections. Real life often doesn't make that easy. Hmm.

“Networked games work better than reality”; they come with better instructions; better feedback; better community

A lot of people care more about their game lives than their real lives; and this is perfectly rational. “For many gamers today, in terms of perceived quality of life, virtuality it beating reality”

So what do we do about it?

Jane thinks that instead of making games that provide ever-better 'offsets' to reality, we can make life more like a game.

“My car is a video game” - hybrid car with great visual feedback about driver's performance.

Chore Wars - 'finally you can claim experience points for housework'... “MMO-style missions around doing housework”

Serios from Seriosity - designed for the enterprise, around virtual currency. Every time you send an email asking someone to do something for you, you have to assign an amount of currency to it. Great visual feedback about how the company works...

Oh boy.

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Web 2.0 Summit - J. Craig Venter

Jcraig Venter
The last day of Web 2.0 kicks off with Tim O'Reilly in conversation with “the world's leading genetic engineer', J. Craig Venter. His new book is out today...

Tim - The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed; Craig has had his complete genome decoded, and is living in a future that the rest of us will reach.

Craig - ”I'm J. Craig Venter 1.0“.

Tim - might you check your genome like we check our stocks?

Craig - I think it's inevitable that this might happen.

Wants to reach 10,000 individuals with their whole genome sequenced.

At end of 2001, we assumed we all had the same genes, and that differences between people were determined at the edges. Now we know it's far more complex, hence the need to capture entire genomes.

Tim - what about privacy?

Craig - well my genome's on the internet, so it's not very private.

Tim - but what about use in law enforcement, insurance companies, etc? [Sounds like the book I read on the flight over!]

Tim - ”so you don't think people will google their date's genome before going out on a date?“

Craig - ”I think it would be a very good idea, especially if they planned to have kids“.

Hmm.

Recognition that we need to legislate to protect against prejudice. But does that really work?

Tim - moving from reading the genome to writing it...

Synthetic genomics - remake the analogue genetic code (dna) from digitised forms in the computer, and 'boot up life'. Two weeks to go from digitised dna to 'viral particles' in the lab.

Tim - how far can we synthesise a living bacteria?

Craig - weeks to months away. (!)

Tim - what's it going to mean, when we're synthesising really large genomes?

Craig - it'll change everything. ...trying to find a substitute for burning oil and coal... new fuel in testing that could be a green jet fuel... biological fuel cells, driven by bacteria, that take human waste water (very polite!) and either generate electricity or produce clean water.

”ethanol's great for drinking, it's not a good fuel“

Tim - synthetic biology - danger of designer organisms.

Craig - fortunately there aren't that many people on the planet with that intent. Naive, surely?

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Web 2.0 Summit - tying it all together with Twine

20071018-Twine

Talis Platform Advisory Group member Nova Spivack just brought Radar Networks out of stealth, announcing twine to his Twitter followers.

“Twine is a new service for sharing, organizing and finding information with people you trust. Use Twine to better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams. Twine ties it all together.”

The more traditional press release from Radar Networks is here.

“Twine provides a smarter way for people to leverage and contribute to the combined brainpower of their relationships. 'We call this knowledge networking,' said Radar Networks Founder and CEO Nova Spivack. 'It’s the next evolution of collective intelligence on the Web. Unlike social networking and community tools, Twine is not just about who you know, it’s about what you know. Twine is the ultimate tool for gathering and sharing knowledge on the Web.'”

This is similar in sentiment to some of our work around the Web of Intentions, and I look forward to seeing how the horde here react when they see a union between 2.0 and Semantic Web such as this one.

Good luck, Radar. The Semantic market is a nascent one, and we all need to work together (as members of the Talis Platform Advisory Group already do) to raise profile and credibility, and to grow the market to the benefit of us all.

Nicholas Carr has had a look, and has more to say... As do Wired, Richard MacManus and others in this clearly well-orchestrated campaign of news releases...

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Web 2.0 Summit - Launch Pad

Presentations from 6 startups - audience to choose the 'best'. Startups have not paid to present.

Judges on the stage - vcs

Greg Brockway, Tripit

“Make travel easier”. Help people organise their travel plans, and share them with family, colleagues, etc.

'Simply' forward electronic bookings from airlines etc to a Tripit email address. Their software scrapes the important information (times, dates, locations) from those email messages to create a rich itinerary.

Also includes dopplr-like ideas... your friends can see where you're going to be.

New feature - TripitToMe... command line/ sms/ email interface to query your stored trips, reservations, etc.

VCs not sure how you'd make money out of this.

Jay Holberd, Spiceworks

Fastest growing (free) IT Management and Helpdesk product. Funded by ads.

VC says “this product has nailed it”... “better than Salesforce, with a better model”. I'm trying to work out why...

Chuck Teller, Realius

Building 'fantasy real estate games'...

Real demographic, crime, school, etc data... underpinning a series of online games.

77% of homebuyers research their home online, but real estate advertising online lags behind.

Players view the data, look at the house, and guess how much it would cost. They're also able to see other players' estimates, leveraging (or at least surfacing) the wisdom of the crowds.

“Online game derives real life engagement”

Chuck reckons that real estate sites will embed links to this site on their web pages, and that everyone likes to talk about how much houses cost. He says that their game will support this.

Revenue models include charging estate agents to have their staff play the game for training purposes.

I don't get it...

Ghost

Global Hosted Operating System (free). I'm all for computing in the cloud... but it seems silly to try to replicate replicate the desktop paradigm (with all its limitations) in a browser.

Tom Cuthbert, ClickForensics

“fighting the click fraud problem”

Click fraud getting worse, and advertisers had no real idea as to how much of an impact it was having on their campaigns until ClickForensics. Almost 16% of all clicks billed to an advertiser are fraudulent. In more focussed ad networks, the figure is over 25%.

Todd Humphrey, Cleverset

“Introducing true personalisation”

“Serving the right things to the right person at the right time”

Moving beyond 'simple' product recommendations.

Tracks previous behaviour, maps relationships, models visitor actions and reactions. The more data they have, the better the recommendations become.

Hmm. If those six are the 'best', that's disappointing. There were bits of an idea in a couple of them, but surely we're capable of better than that?

And the awards, selected by John listening to the level of applause... Best of Show goes to Cleverset. They were the most interesting of a disappointing bunch, so well done to them for that.

Best Presentation goes to Ghost. Eh? Just shows that democracy doesn't always work... ;-)

Most creative idea goes to Spiceworks. John stresses that we don't have to think the idea would actually work. Oh boy.

Most likely to exit first goes to Cleverset.

And we're done...

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Web 2.0 Summit - Adam Selipsky on Amazon Web Services

Adam Selipsky
Adam Selipsky, VP for Product Management and Developer Relations at Amazon Web Services.

S3, EC2, etc. - In-the-cloud infrastructure services.

265,000+ registered developers in Q2.

Amazon Flexible Payment Service - supports micro-payments etc... and exposes web services onto Amazon's existing payment infrastructure.

800 million 'objects' stored in S3 (July 2006).

5 bn in April this year.

10 billion objects stored in S3 today. That's a lot...

27,601 transactions per second this month.

SLA for S3 released last week.

New types of 'instance' in EC2 - larger and more powerful virtual machines for specific requirements. EC2 beta now open to any developer.

Zillow.com using AWS. (S3 and EC2)

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18 October 2007

Web 2.0 Summit - Jeff Huber from Google

Jeff Huber
Jeff talking about the Programmable Web... and Google Gadgets.

Over 20,000 Google Gadgets since January 2006. Billions served each week, from iGoogle and from 100,000 or more syndicated sites.

63 gadgets have over 1,000,000 active users.

483 with over 100,000 active users.

50% of traffic outside the top 125 apps.

Applications are fundamentally changing from monolithic sites to smaller feeds and containers. Extending beyond consumers to the enterprise space.

Platforms - Platform race is over. The internet has won. The web is the Platform. It is open, fast, easy.

Now lunch.

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Web 2.0 Summit - Bill Tancer

Bill Tancer

Bill Tancer from Hitwise.

Predictive power of web 2.0 data...

Adoption curve being compressed in the Web 2.0 world; change happens in days or weeks.

If you have the right data, you can predict and learn.

eg tracking traffic from MySpace/ Facebook et band pages to the official band site, and spot the tipping point before a band becomes successful.

Hitwise have enough data that they can track and identify early adopters for different market categories, and predict what they will do next. 0.5% of users are the early adopters.

Analysis would suggest emerging sites are Keepvid, Bix, Stickam, veoh and Wikimedia.

Find out more at www.ilovedata.com.

Has Facebook use plateaued, or is it just a seasonal dip in traffic?

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Web 2.0 Summit - Niall Kennedy

Niall Kennedy
Niall Kennedy from Hat Trick Media is on stage now. Talking about WidgetSummit earlier this week.

Widget basics - static assets (the basic look and feel), client-side user preferences (where am I?), dynamic data (delivered over the web, to make the widget DO something), built-in proxies and caching, rich platform integration.

Shows Apple's Dashboard weather widget as an example.

myspace - 5.17% (of internet audience use)
google - 5.03%
facebook - 0.96%
yahoo! - 0.37%

AdWords now recognising widgets that offer far more interactive and personalised advertising. More engaging.

Widgets aggregating existing content from else where; increasing value of existing investment.

Widgets on the desktop and on mobile devices. Also, NetVibes-style personal homepages offer widgetised at-a-glance access to data from various sources. Blog sidebars, etc too.

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Web 2.0 Summit - Dan Scheinman

Dan Scheinman
Dan Scheinman of Cisco is up on stage now.

Cisco a networking company. But also - now - engaging with social networking space. Why?

“Content finds you”.

“Network plus Web 2.0”

Launching “Eos - an open software-platform for creating and managing a community-based entertainment experience.” Integrated, Discovery-driven, open, simplicity, user-focused, multimedia, SaaS, customer-branded.

Powering Nascar and NHL sites?

Platform to launch early 2008.

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Web 2.0 Summit - Mary Meeker's High Order Bit

Mary Meeker
Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley gives her regular overview of trends.

Consumers number one users of semiconductors for first time. Consumer use of the internet should pass corporate use in 2008.

91% of mobile users keep their phone within a metre of themselves, 24/7.

70% of PC users are outside US. 85% of Internet use is outside US. 92% of mobile use is outside the US.

There's plenty more data to digest in the slides...

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Web 2.0 Summit - Facebook as a Platform session

Dave Supernova
Next up, 'Facebook as a Platform'. A panel discussion on the Platform, talking to some of the top developers of apps. Chaired by Dave McClure... Hard to hear the panel on their sofa... so apologies for the lack of info here...

Keith Rabois - Slide available on both MySpace and Facebook. Around 35% of effort devoted to Facebook development.

Seth Goldstein - building a range of apps for Facebook.

Lance Tokuda - “neat thing about Facebook platform is that you can actually talk to your friends through widgets built on it”. Expects to see Facebook api implemented elsewhere; social graphs driving apps.

Ali Portovi - largest community on Facebook. Million active users on a daily basis... Stopped building their own website/app... and devoted their effort to an app inside Facebook... and this has paid off. Forty spare servers at startup, just in case... Deliberately launched at a quiet period over Memorial Day weekend. Within 24 hours, Facebook registrations exceeded main website traffic - 10,000 in first 12 hours. 10,000 more in next three hours. And ongoing. Borrowed/bought 40 more servers to cope. A good proof-point for commoditised compute resources like EC2, surely...?

Most people see Facebook/MySpace apps as hook to draw people to their application/ website. iLike see it the other way; their web site is an advert for their Facebook app.

Panelists seeing Facebook as important to their growth; 30-90% of revenue/effort around the table.

Sound improving...

350,000,000 application installs via Facebook Platform. Aiming at over 1bn by the end of the year. Hundreds of millions of page views. But most of the apps are “useless stuff”?

Slide - 90 millon installs of TopFriends. Are you still trying to acquire new users?

How do you measure success? Pageviews? Users? Dollars?

Seth - apps and dollars.

Keith - obsessive-compulsive about metrics.

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Web 2.0 Summit - a conversation with Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman
Tim O'Reilly takes to the stage, to have a conversation with Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay.

Tim - eBay really first example of a Web 2.0 success; a site built by its participants. Interested in “how you harness those participants to deliver competitive advantage.”

Tim - “What are you doing to try to keep eBay growing?”

Meg - $50Bn of product will be traded through eBay this year. If we were a traditional retailer we'd be 5th or 6th largest globally.

You have to be willing to take risk, you have to be willing to change, to evolve. Move from primarily auction-based to primarily fixed-price.

Two kinds of sellers; casual sellers and hobbyists on one hand, and people who make a living on eBay.

Could PayPal (owned by eBay) become your identity and your reputation, as well as your wallet? “Potentially”.

Tim - Skype - “you got a lot of knocks with the write-down recently, but are you still bullish?”

Meg - “Yes. Skype has huge potential. Delight the user. Innovate” Write-down takes some of the pressure off. Lets Skype grow and evolve and improve. One of the fastest growing apps of its age. Successful. But now can be seen as successful without the pressure of revenue targets etc.

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