We all know the concept of ‘watching a train wreck in slow motion’, but I am not sure what the opposite effect is called, however this week I suspect that is what I have been watching. At one end of the track has been the publishing of a new report by Forrester, one of the most respected analyst firms, in my opinion, entitled ‘Technology Populism; risks and rewards’; pretty self-evident what it’s about. A good comment on this report and aligned topics can be found at the readwriteweb, which I find an interesting site generally.
The other end of the track and coming towards the Populism was an event last week in Atlanta by the TTI Vanguard group, one of those fascinating groups that have a board of some seriously smart and experienced people, and are focussed on disruptive change by technology. Not sure how long they will keep up the proceedings of the event on their site, but this was all about ‘Smart(er) Data’, and some pretty details looking into the whole notation that data and relationship has to get changed in the ‘Google’ generation.
Again I don’t want to go through the event in detail, better you should read the details for yourself, but pick out the comment that ‘data acquires its reputation from the search engine’ and the subsequent comments on structure, versus a picture is worth a thousand words, etc. It’s all about context, and my belief is, based on asking people I meet who read my blog posts, that you are using me as a context filter. The links I have just given would not be immediately apparent to a search engine, but may be useful if you are following my own trail of exploration through how these new technologies are changing things. If Web 2.0 is anything it’s about people and relationships adding value to content.
That leads me to Twine, currently still under trials, and a move to introduce another generation to Social Networking, to which I should perhaps add a little history and say that MySpace, Facebook, etc, did grow out of an earlier generation that stretches back more than ten years. What seems to have made it happen for them was a mixture of timing, in terms of people, web use, broadband, etc, but most of all execution. So Twine is at this stage an interesting development with a long way to go!
Twine attempts to bring semantic understanding built around learning your interests, and actions, to then automatically organise information, and relationships for you. Just pause for a minute and reflect on the populism, which also means creation of data/content, the point above around needing to know more about the data origination, and consider just how much of … well everything, that’s going to produce. Keyword searches are not going to be enough, nor tagging either; we are going to need a lot more help then that. So if the above is happening, and I think we all know it is, the new log jam won’t be bandwidth, it will be ability to comprehend. That’s what interests me in Twine and developments in Semantics, though I am not sure right now that I would want to adopt another populism and call it Web 3.0!
However if you go back to using a search engine then you will find an awful lot of blog comments on Twine, there is a good summary here, and even Nicolas Carr had something good to say about it, I suggest that you make up your own mind by visiting Twine yourself!