Here at ReadWriteWeb, we find the Semantic Web fascinating. We write about it a lot. What is the semantic web? The way we explain it is that it's a paradigm advocating that the meaning of content on the web be made machine readable.
Why would you want to do that? Because once the "meaning" of text is automatically discernible, there's a whole new world of things we can do with content on the web. Far out things that full text search for the mere presence of keywords would never be able to accomplish. Who's working on the semantic web and how can you meet them? Read on.
Want to put your ear to the ground and find out what any group of bloggers are talking about? Some types of bloggers link out to each other a lot, making it easy to see what the hot topics are (see Techmeme, or Technorati). In some circles, though, blogs don't link to other blogs' posts regularly. That's why there will only be so many variations of Techmeme and why we need other tools if we want to track conversations in other parts of the blogging world.
That's what a new service called FeedVis offers. Give it a bundle of blogs (in OPML format) and it will give you a scrollable, searchable tag cloud - a visual representation of the most-used words in a given period of time among a defined group of blogs on any topic.
In the second RWW Live of 2009, we go in-depth about a web standard that made big strides in 2008 and is being increasingly adopted by Internet companies big and small: OpenID. At the end of December, the OpenID Foundation announced its new Board - and we have several of those board members on the RWW Live podcast show today. They are Scott Kveton and Chris Messina from Vidoop, Brian Kissel from JanRain, and David Recordon from SixApart. As usual, RWW Live will be hosted by Sean Ammirati, with Marshall Kirkpatrick and yours truly (Richard MacManus) on the show.
Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System has found a new experimental feature for Google Search: preferred sites. Thanks to this, you may soon be able to tell Google about your favorite sites and have them appear more often in your search results. If you like to get your movie data from the IMDB, for example, you can tell Google to prefer this site over other movie review services. This feature would also be very useful if you want Google to prefer results from your local newspaper over stories from national papers, or if you want to see product reviews from specific sites.
Open web enthusiast Todd Ronin has published a cool mock-up animation of what an "activity stream" might look like on an Android phone. The design is simple but is something we can imagine enjoying on our phones, a lot.
Android is Google's super-open mobile operating system that hasn't moved the needle yet, but is great for discussions like this and could end up much bigger than the iPhone. Activity Streams are the rivers of updates on what you and your friends are doing across different social networks. Most of the major social networking vendors are working hard to figure out what kind of standards could allow these activity streams to flow freely from one site to another. Here's one vision of what that could look like on your phone.
According to Dan Primack on peHub, Geni, the popular genealogy and social networking site founded by PayPal's David Sacks, just raised another $5 million in a Series C round backed by Charles River Ventures and The Founders Fund. In early 2007, Geni raised a total of $1.5 million in a series A round led by The Founders Fund and another $10 million is a series B round led by Charles River Ventures.
While Geni itself is a popular service, a lot of attention has lately gone to Yammer, a side project that grew out of the same company and which is a Twitter-like service geared towards enterprise users. It is not clear if any of the money raised in this latest round will go towards expanding Yammer.
Cell phone providers hold a wealth of information about your real-world social network in their records that you can theoretically access through their cumbersome web interfaces. None of the cell phone companies we are aware of do a good job at presenting this information in a meaningful way, however. This is where Skydeck comes in. Skydeck, which released a major update to its service this morning, can access your provider's call data, as well as your text messages and voicemail. For a fee, Skydeck will also transcribe your voicemails and allow you to make calls directly from Skydeck's web interface.
For years people have speculated that Google would use some of its incredible capacity to offer dedicated online data storage, something like a "Google Drive." Hints that such a project is in the works have popped up time and again, but some interesting new ones have emerged lately.
Why would you like a Google Drive service? For the presumably very low price point (free?), for the ease of backing up important data or for the potential integration of stored data into other powerful Google services? There's lots of reasons to perk up your ears when rumors like this pop up.
FriendDeck is a new web-based interface designed for performing searches across the social web aggregation service, FriendFeed. Having obviously taken inspiration from the popular Twitter desktop application, TweetDeck, FriendDeck displays information in columns that spread across your screen, allowing you to track multiple search terms within the same window. As the individual items appear, you have the option of clicking "like" or commenting inline on the postings.
New data released by Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI) gives us insight into how men and women engage in "simultaneous media use" - that is, surfing the net while also doing some other activity like watching TV. According to the study, it's more common for women to watch TV and use the computer than it is for men. What's more, women supposedly get better at this multi-tasking as they age.
