There are too many choices available for consumers when it comes to devices and apps that track your steps or daily activities. What needs to happen is consolidation across the industry and a focus on storytelling, not just activity.
Former Valleywag editor Owen Thomas is joining a web-based media startup called The Daily Dot, co-founded by Nova Spivack and Valley PR guy Josh Jones-Dilworth. Details about what the site will do are vague, Thomas admitted in an interview, but it will be about online communities.
Is the emergence of the real-time web a sign of a society obsessed with the present? From Twitter to Facebook, signs indicate as much, and this is redefining the idea of Now and how it impacts everything from innovation to how we live.
The web is now host to many live events — streaming video, virtual worlds meetings, online sample sales — but there’s no grid to tell us where it all lives and what’s on at any one time. That’s what Live Matrix wants to do.
The idea of the semantic web is both compelling and scary. And although the web will continue to become more useful over time, it won’t ever replace the benefits of human interactions.
Semantic web believers including Tim Berners-Lee and Nova Spivack like to say that the social graph is part of their semantic world: the Giant Global Graph (GGG) as coined by Tim Berners-Lee. But the Giant Global Graph itself is like Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant character Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Raymond knew all about plane trips but couldn’t make sense of human relationships.
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee uses the Social Graph meme to rebrand his semantic web efforts, writing in a blog post, “I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!” Berners-Lee thinks there could be big payoff in adding a layer of meaning atop the documents of the World Wide Web:
So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents.
