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.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Web 2.0, web2summit

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…

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 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.

Similar example here on Flickr… uploaded by Powerset.

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…

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Talis, Talis Platform, Talis Platform Advisory Group, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web2summit

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.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Web 2.0, web2summit

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

Technorati Tags: Talis, web2summit

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.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Talis, web2summit

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)

Technorati Tags: Talis, Web 2.0, web2summit

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!

Technorati Tags: Talis, web2summit

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…“

Technorati Tags: Talis, web2summit

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.

Technorati Tags: Talis, web2summit

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…

Technorati Tags: Talis, web2summit