Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be the birthplace of the American geek. Within MIT, its Media Lab drills down to the heart of the next wave of technology from creating buildings with 3D printing to prosthetic limbs to gesture-based user interfaces. For instance, the MIT Media Lab was where the idea for the technology seen in the movie Minority Report originated.
The unofficial motto of the MIT Media Lab is "demo or die." It is akin to the classic academic model of "publish or perish," except that students and faculty at the Media Lab are encouraged to actually create the products they are thinking up, as opposed to pontificating upon them in research papers. See below to check out some of the amazing waves of technology that will be bursting out of the Media Lab in the future.
At their annual conference this week in St. Louis, an international group of botanists are working on two efforts to integrate the Web into their efforts. Called the US Virtual Herbarium and the Open Science Network for Ethnobiology, both are trying to make education and use of plant materials easier for scientists around the globe.
The dream of creating a structured database of the world's content has eluded Google's grasp. But at least it got a bunch of useful retail data out of it.
The Web world is nothing if not Darwinian: it's survival of the fittest and products need to evolve with the times. Some Web products fly and some don't. Those that don't fly either die out, or evolve into something new. The latter is what happened to Google Base, which in 2011 is a shadow of its former self - and is even about to lose its API. It did however spin off a more successful offering, in the form of the Google Merchant Center for retailers. In this post, we look back on the initial vision for Google Base and then analyze what it actually evolved into.
Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 'Best Of' series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year.
This year we've chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The startups represent the cutting edge of Semantic Web. Each has made an impact on the Internet this year, with user growth and innovation. The organizations we've selected - which include Facebook, Google and the BBC - offered the best examples of large scale deployment of semantic technology.
This morning at Nokia World 2010 in London, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely known as the inventor of the Web, addressed the audience in a keynote speech where he spoke about the future of mobile technology, including both the positive impacts it brings as well as the areas of concern. After encouraging developers to build for the Web, so as to deliver applications that work on all types of devices, even the ones that haven't been invented yet, he then proceeded to detail areas which need addressing, specifically privacy, accountability, network neutrality and the 80% of the world that doesn't have access to the World Wide Web.
The Palo Alto Research Center is releasing new semantic technology, based on Xerox PARC IP, in the form of an Outlook plugin called Meshin. At first glance, Meshin looks like the ugly stepsister to a similar Outlook tool called Xobni, as it also loads into an email sidebar window, displaying sections dedicated to recent conversations and a summary of attachments shared back and forth via email, among other things. But what makes Meshin different is the engine powering it underneath: a semantic technology that uses "natural language processing" to understand entities, how they connect and what they mean.
Invites available! Click through for link.
SPARQLZ is a stealth technology project aimed to provide a graphical user interface for everyday users to assemble, edit, share and mash-up modular, persistent, real-time searches across the web of Linked Data. It's a side project by an independent team within a large data corporation, with dreams of spinning their work off as a startup.
It's a pretty hot idea: it's like Yahoo Pipes, for Linked Data - but easier to use and already populated with big sets of valuable information to mashup and parse. Linked Data is a growing field of datasets that are categorized with standardized markup, tied together and easily cross referencable by machines. The US and UK governments, news organizations, music data bases, social networks and other organizations are participating in the official W3C Linked Data community. Now SPARQLZ aims to make all that data easy to construct future-facing search queries for.
A few weeks ago I wrote that we've moved to an era of the Web that is beyond social. My contention is that successful services of this era of the Web will be ones that filter, structure and personalize the vast amount of data coming onto the Web. An example of this kind of application is Hunch, which this week re-launched as an Internet personalization service. Hunch is one of a number of modern web services aiming to connect you not only to other people, but to products and objects.
Hunch co-founder and Chief Product Office Caterina Fake told Wired in a recent profile that "the ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."
Today, applications increasingly depend on a rich ecosystem of APIs. Thousands of different services are variously tethered together to form new software offerings and enhance existing ones. The idea of a programmable Web is finally coming true.
While this is not trivial, I am nonetheless beginning to question the long-term effects of an API-centric worldview, a sort of blind faith in the almighty API, which has at best a difficult relationship with open data and big data concepts.
