ReadWriteWeb

Thanks to successful projects like Wikipedia or Wikitravel, wikis have quickly become a standard tool on the Internet, but in academia, the anonymity often associated with publishing in wikis is a key factor that works against them. Tracking down the exact history of changes in a wiki entry can be a convoluted process, yet being able to exactly attribute a certain statement to one writer is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Mememoir aims to provide a wiki that is heavily focused on authorship and can help to dispel the prejudices scientists have against publishing in a wiki-like format.

When you hear the word "semantic" you likely think of the semantic web - the supposed next iteration of the World Wide Web that features structured data and specific protocols that aim to bring about an "intelligent" web. But the concept of semantics doesn't necessarily apply just to the web - it can apply to other things as well, like your desktop...or even your Excel spreadsheets, according to Ian Goldsmid, founder of Semantic Business Intelligence, whose new app, SDS, brings a semantic system to spreadsheets.

Google's breadth of services is truly awesome and the amount of information the company touches concerning our lives and world can sometimes feel downright frightening. While almost no one takes the old phrase "Don't Be Evil" seriously anymore now that there are billions of dollars on the table and Chinese autocrats to satisfy - regular evaluations of Google's ethical positions still seem advisable.

One of the big questions being asked with increasing frequency is this: Is Google using data it collects through particular services and using it for its benefit in other services? We know the company scans our GMail and uses the text there to sell ads, but is this a tactic being employed across services? Some people appear to believe it is.

Tony Sukiennik believes the power of the people trumps the power of the algorithm when it comes to the development of semantic technology. His company, infoGenome, a startup that has been in stealth mode for about four and half years, wants to harness that power by making semantics easy via its innovative drag-and-drop functionality. The i360 software he's developed is essentially the "Mahalo of semantic apps," relying on human knowledge to add meaningful layers of metadata to the information we work with every day. With i360, you can add semantics to everything.

From Brussels-based company Attentio comes a new blog search engine and trend-tracking tool called Trendpedia. The service, now out of beta, lets you scan the blogosphere for trends to see what's getting buzz. Trendpedia also lets you compose visualizations of those trends as charts and graphs, which can then be shared on the social web.

Today, a story on Techmeme caught our eye. It was entitled "We Need a Wikipedia for data," and the article, written by X-Googler Bret Taylor, discussed the difficulty of finding open data sets on the internet, something which could spur innovation, allowing programmers to build new applications the likes of which have never been seen before. What was interesting about this story, in addition to, obviously, the concept of a Data Wiki itself, was the amazing and insightful commentary around this concept, not just on the blog, but all over the net, something which led to the discovery of some pretty good data sources that are already available.

Earlier this month, EMC released their findings regarding the digital universe in a publication entitled "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe." Some of the research focused on mind-blowing figures - like the 281 billion GB size of the digital universe or the predicted size of the digital universe by 2011, nearly 1.8 zettabytes (1,800 exabytes). However, what really peaked our interest was information provided on your "Digital Shadow," that is, all the digital information generated about an average person on a daily basis.

Earthmine, the Best Technology Innovation/Achievement category winner at tonight's Crunchies, is a company that might seem uninteresting at first glance. When I first saw earthmine I assumed that it was just a Google Maps Streetview knock-off. I was wrong.

This startup is doing something far more interesting than that. While Google Maps and related consumer products have whetted the public's appetite for visualization of specific places on a map, earthmine is making those places machine readable.