ReadWriteWeb

The Internet is a mess these days.

Conversations are distributed and fragmented; a blog post's comments will almost surely appear on a number of sites other than the author's blog. Considering factors from Facebook shares, likes, and posts to comments on Google Reader or even content curators such as Hacker News, site owners have found it increasingly difficult over the past year or so to efficiently and effectively collect all the sentiments, media, entities, and data associated with any given piece of content. Salmon is a protocol that addresses this specific issue, and engineer John Panzer has begun an open-source project to help unify the conversations of the synaptic web.

JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux sees the Internet as a digital brain, a network of nodes and synapses firing signals through pathways in relays of ever-increasing speed and intelligence.

At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, he talked to us about how the synaptic web, as he calls it, relies on real-time communication and distributed networking to tie together our communal body of online knowledge. In this interview, Loux talks about the new school of online reputation management, the essence of distributed social networks, and how the synaptic web shapes and heals itself as users collectively contribute to the dataset.

At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit last week a great time was had by (almost) all and participants are telling us it was one of the most valuable events they've been to in a long time. We so appreciate everyone's support in making it a great event!

Now that it's over - it's time to talk about what comes next. Below you'll find some thoughts - you can help us decide what ReadWriteWeb will do to follow up on this first event. Real-Time Web on the East Coast or Augmented Reality on the West Coast? Let us know what you think.

At our ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit in Mountain View last week, we came across Stinky Teddy, a new real-time meta-search engine developed by David Hardtke. Before starting this project, Hradtke worked as a physicist at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. Hardtke named his new project after his daughter's "trusted (and abused) stuffed bear." Stinky Teddy, which Hardtke describes as "real-time gossip powered metasearch," combines search results from Bing, Yahoo, VideoSurf, Twitter and Collecta and reshuffles the search results to focus on topics that are trending right now.

One of the greatest problems of this environment is said to be the capacity for information overload. At a Summit session, representatives of some of the most "filter-geeky" real-time startups debated the methods and merits of parsing data from the real-time web. Shellen's was one of the most authoritative voices in the session, and his one-on-one insights are well worth listening to.

News aggregation startup Thoora is celebrating its public release just one day after ReadWriteWeb's Real-Time Summit. In June, we wrote about the fact that CNN was hours behind Twitter in reporting news from Tehran. As real-time services continue to trump traditional media outlets, companies like Thoora have jumped on the chance to build a better news source. Since Thoora's recent demo at TC50, reviewers are already questioning whether the company can survive in what is proving to be a crowded space.

If you've ever worked with an advocacy group, you understand how important it is to stretch your scarce resources. In the face of dwindling government grants, a looming recession, and the fear of losing your volunteers, the real-time web can be a boon in getting legislation passed. Today's ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summit attendees took time to discuss some of the cause-based tools that can help in this bubbling river of data.