Making sense of the web with structured mark-up
January 31, 2008
Great article here from ReadWriteWeb. As a fan of well formed and structured mark-up, adding meaning to it in the form of annotation and things that should be standards such as Microformats makes perfect sense.
3 questions for Nova…
January 30, 2008
Radar Networks are one of the companies I’m really keeping an eye on at the moment. Their Twine product has great potential and CEO Nova Spivack has a lot of interesting things to say about the semantic web as a whole. Semantic web is without a doubt the future and as such makes any players worth keeping an eye on.
Here’s Novas’ answers to three questions posed to him on video recently.
Trendsspottings 2008 predictions
January 28, 2008
Most interesting as ever as Trendsspotting goes out to ask some of the web’s bloggers, influencers and experts to name their upcoming trends of 2008.
Surprised to see no mention of knowledge exchange, I (personally) think that with the rise of the knowledge worker the next logical step is a rise in services that enable and enhance the share of knowledge and intellectual resources, perhaps the birth of the oft mused about (real) knowledge networks… Also very surprised only one person mentioned semantic web as ‘in’ for 2008…
Artificial stupidity
January 28, 2008
Great post here from Nova (creator of Twine).
Allowing technology to help us out in areas where we as humans are lacking is a really good mantra that can apply to web as a whole. Rather than spending all your time trying to create the killer app to make users lives easier (and your pockets fuller) why not concentrate on simple improvements that incrementally make the experience better for your users? The simple, boring, monotonous tasks are the ones that are easiest to automate and often have the best return!
Semantic web report available
January 18, 2008
Project 10x has a summary of it’s semantic web available to download for free. Interesting reading if you find the future of online intriguing. Visit their site to sign up to download the summary.
Semantic Web for non-geeks
January 15, 2008
Wondering what all the fuss is about the semantic web? Not understanding all the geek speak that goes along with it? Watch this video then; makes it all a lot simpler…
The first semantic killer app and some travel thoughts
January 10, 2008
Alex Iskold has written a great article over at Read/Write Web posing some ideas about what could be the first semantic killer web app.
For me the killer app will be one of two things. Either a true natural language, intelligent search engine that understands what users mean by their generally vague search queries and intelligently learns from your searches to keep improving on your search results. The other possibility (in my opinion) is an organiser tool based on social graph portability and semantic understanding of the data you store there, thus enabling easy organisation of your data/contacts/information and intelligent linking/suggestion of uses for it. The second option is a little vague but it’s something I personally would find useful as I have hoardes of personal data stored in various web services with no real links between them, joining this data up could be a very powerful thing.
Semantic search would be an amazing addition to a travel website. A lot of online travel sites are currently getting into intelligent search as a new way to browse content and mine prices and information, the addition of semantic understanding to these intelligent algorithms could make finding a holiday online a much more rewarding experience for the user by providing real suggestions and inspirational content accurately based on a users searches. Technology like this could also herald the end of the traditional booking engine as a starting point for travel sites and get back to a more user friendly model of assisted browsing and content mining.
Scoble looks at Twine; in depth look at semantic web app
December 13, 2007
I’ve blogged about Twine before, it’s a really nice looking semantic web application from Radar Networks. Now Robert Scoble has had the opportunity to spend some time with them and videoed the experience and lot’s of Twine functionality. Well worth a view. The version below is almost an hour long, there’s a shorter version available here on the Scoble Show too.
I’ve held off blogging about TripIt until I could do it full justice. I can’t trial the system and haven’t looked at it in enough detail to give it a full assessment but I can’t ignore something with this potential any longer so I’m going to give it a quick mention anyway (I’m sure there’ll be more about this to come).
TripIt is an online travel planner/organiser with a bit of a difference. They’ve taken a different approach to most of these systems and rather than have you fill out all your details to then share or add to they let you forward your travel booking confirmation emails to their servers so they can extract data and meaning from them. TripIt then build a master itinerary out of all the meaningful data it can extract and present that back to you. You can then access it from anywhere and share it with whoever you like. It only works with certain airlines, hoteliers and other travel providers emails so has it’s limitations at the moment but the idea is sound.
In fact the idea is more than sound in my opinion. I think it’s fairly groundbreaking in the travel and also the online arena. Extracting meaningful data out of something as mundane as email confirmations is a great idea. Ordering the items by date and time and presenting them back in a nice interface that can be accessed easily from multiple device types is even better. Then imagine allowing users to add more stuff to the itinerary themselves, say even before they leave (transport to the airport, perhaps dropping the dog off at kennels) and you have a way to plan the full holiday experience much more easily. This offers a multitude of opportunities to then present offers and cross sells to entice users to buy something from TripIts’ partners as well. Very smart!
Now TripIt have announced support for various calendaring solutions such as Google Calendar, Outlook and any other iCal supporting software. You can export your itinerary to your calendar which is very cool! They also announced support for PDF confirmations, address book import functions and international support for things like temperature (which they display with destinations).
All in it’s a fantastic idea and I really hope they nail the trip planning concept! They seem to have the right entrepreneurial spirit to go far. For instance they were in the Techcrunch 40 event which shows they mix in the right circles and can hold their own with real web people not just travel (which is refreshing).
Now, all the rest of us need to do is start using Microformats to describe the mark-up in our confirmation emails, then get TripIt to support hCalendar and then we can all get involved!
Note: I mention semantic as I believe the way TripIt extracts meaning from email content is a real step towards a semantic application.
10 Semantic Web Apps to Watch
November 29, 2007
The semantic web is getting more and more coverage now that there are some semantic applications coming into the light and out of (or into) beta.
Here’s a great post from Read/WriteWeb highlighting ten of the best of the moment. More to come on some of these when I have time but for now go read the post at the link above.
