Surely the computer should do that?
Computer rendering of the Chicago Spire. This is not the current design as of July 12, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) We have become accustomed to the simple yet all-powerful search box. ‘Advanced’ search options and arcane query syntaxes have largely been replaced by the learned behaviour of throwing some words at Google*, ignoring the sponsored [...]
Top Level Domain for data answers the wrong question
Image of Stephen Wolfram via Wikipedia British-born computer scientist Stephen Wolfram sees ongoing efforts to extend the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar .com, .org, .uk etc as an opportunity to raise the profile of machine-readable data. In a blog post published yesterday, he argues that a new .data domain would increase “exposure of data on [...]
June is San Francisco month
For real-world applications of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, the long-running Semantic Technology Conference is hard to beat. For getting a real handle on the Cloud Computing landscape, GigaOM‘s Structure Conference is also a leading light. Working across both areas as I do, these events tend to figure prominently in my calendar for the [...]
Is there a disconnect between Big Data and the Web of Data ?
Image via Wikipedia ‘Big Data‘ is currently capturing the imagination, attracting hype, investment and ambitious startups in almost equal measure. Kim and Eric Norlin’s excellent Defrag and Glue events have gained big-name company, with O’Reilly‘s Strata and GigaOM‘s Structure both set to arrive in the first quarter of 2011. Venture firms like IA Ventures have emerged, specifically [...]
Web 3.0 – A Documentary On Semantic Web
Since we saw Google acquire a Semantic Web company on friday, I thought I will share a neat documentary made by Kate Ray, a recently graduated NYU Journalism/Psychology student. It has interviews with some of the thought leaders in the field. The original video can be found here.
Google Buys Freebase – This is Huge
Today, Google shocked the pundit world by announcing that they have bought Metaweb, the company behind one of the largest structured database Freebase. Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world [...]
Cloud Computing, Advertising and TV
From a trebling of web traffic within sixty seconds of Channel 4 mentioning the Celebrity Big Brother URL on-air, to 59 million hits in a day to a restaurant web site advertised during the US Super Bowl, advertisers, broadcasters and technologists are falling over themselves to exploit a massive — and growing — opportunity. In my latest piece for [...]
Siri brings their Virtual Personal Assistant’s smarts to the iPhone
Siri provoked a flurry of interest last summer, and presumably not just because CTO Tom Gruber took part in one of my podcasts. With their genesis inside a big DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project, their talk of emergent Virtual Personal Assistants and their slick iPhone-powered demonstrations, the company ticked more than enough of the right boxes [...]
A podcast conversation with Will Hunsinger of Evri
I spoke with Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri, yesterday and the result has just been released as a podcast. Backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Seattle-based Evri is using semantic technologies to “change the way consumers discover and engage with content on the Web.” Via the site at evri.com, users are able to explore news-like [...]
A podcast with Flip Kromer of InfoChimps… and the end of an era
I’ve been following InfoChimps for some time, intrigued by their aspiration to build a marketplace for data that combines the free with the paid. Thanks to the team at Jones-Dilworth (honestly, does Josh have any clients that aren’t interesting?) I managed to get some time with founder Philip (Flip) Kromer and Joseph Kelly whilst over [...]
On the “Synaptic Web”
Chris Saad pointed me to a piece that he and some cohorts have been working on – a fascinating read called, “The Synaptic Web.” Before you start groaning about *yet another* naming convention (the real-time web, web 3.0, etc), take a second and go read it (I’ll wait here). Metaphors, analogies and conceptual frameworks for [...]
