In a recent article in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow called for search reform. “Search is the beginning and the end of the internet,” he wrote. While I agree things need to change, a reformed Internet built around search is like a reformed energy policy built around oil. If we only look for solutions through the narrow lens of search, we’re unlikely to solve these problems at all.

Cory’s article is a tight encapsulation of widely held concerns over search. We share too much private information with search engines. They hold too much power over what is relevant and important. And there is a troubling lack of transparency and accountability into how search engines weigh these decisions.

His bottom line: Vesting this kind of power with a handful of companies is a “terrible idea”.

Fair enough, but when he ventures into possible solutions, Cory, like so many other Internet watchers, makes a serious wrong turn. “Put that way, it’s obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public.”
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How Do We Roll Out The Semantic Web? Paradoxically, the fast track may involve getting help from billions of people who know nothing about the Semantic Web and have no interest in it.

Challenges with current approaches

Most of the current approaches to building the Semantic Web focus on content. We create semantic representations of existing assets such as databases, documents, and social media. Machines “read” this knowledge and execute tasks on behalf of consumers. In the Semantic Web world, the approach is content first, consumers second.

Unfortunately, semantifying content is proving to be an extraordinarily daunting task. When we expand the scope of the problem beyond our existing content assets to include knowledge generally, in all its subjective and boundless glory, the challenges of a content-first approach becomes clear. We need alternative strategies, and more importantly, many hands on the problem. (more…)

Web 2.0 is social: many hands make light work. In stark contrast, Web 3.0 is industrial: the automation of tasks displaces human work. But trite definitions won’t prepare us for change. Whatever you call it, our information economy is in the midst of an Industrial Revolution. And if you don’t place the Web within the frame of industrial manufacturing, you won’t see the real disruptive change coming.

This story reads much like the first Industrial Revolution. Artisans and skilled tradesman used to create everything by hand. Then, through the emergence of a handful of technical innovations, came the age of mass production. It was a profound turning point in human history, affecting every aspect of daily life.

Today, most content is still created by hand, the best of it by highly skilled artisans drawing on centuries of scholarship and experience. Recently, we’ve seen significant innovations in social approaches to content creation. But Web 3.0 industrialization takes content manufacturing to an entirely different level. Instead of users manually creating content, machines automate the heavy lifting. Consumers simply push the buttons and get stuff done. Think spinning wheels versus textile mills.

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Note: This blog post describes the current alpha release of Primal Fusion. If you don’t already have one, we invite you to request a free alpha account now.

The current release of Primal Fusion’s thought networking service is an early first step. In some respects, it’s more of a concept prototype than a fully-fledged product. So when we say it’s an alpha release, we really mean it! Given this, we thought it would be helpful to provide an orientation so you know how to get started after signing in.

Before jumping into the details, a few words about the big picture.

Primal Fusion helps you quickly pull together information about broad subjects from several popular sources on the Web. It does this by first summarizing related thoughts about a subject of interest, then encouraging you to make selections that describe how you think about the subject. Armed with this knowledge, Primal Fusion can act on your thoughts to help you get stuff done online. Currently, one action is available. It creates one-of-a-kind websites (like this one) that organize the information you’ve collected, using your thoughts as a blueprint. These websites are a great resource about the subjects you’re interested in - and they’re easily shared with other people.

The remainder of this blog post outlines a process we recommend for using Primal Fusion in its current form. If you have questions or experience problems, please check our discussion forum to either seek or share more information.

1. Type a few words to describe what you’re thinking about.

After signing in, begin by typing a few words in response to the question, What are you thinking about? Press Enter or click the checkmark when you’re done. Please note that sentences aren’t well supported at this time, so limit your response to two or three keywords.

To illustrate this recommended workflow, let’s use the example of Sarah, a college student.

Sarah needs to write an assignment about the relationship of economics and climate change. She begins by thinking about climate change, as you can see below. (Click these images to zoom in)

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For a good orientation to the alpha release of Primal Fusion, view this 6-minute video of our stage presentation at the DEMO conference.

Interested in what you see? Request a free alpha account today to get hands-on with Primal Fusion.

We’re posting this from the DEMO 09 conference, which is wrapping up with some panel discussions. It’s been a whirlwind few days, with 39 companies launching an impressive array of new products and services. At 9:22 PST this morning, we took to the stage – and in 6 minutes demonstrated Primal Fusion’s new thought networking service. This is the first product we’ve released on our semantic synthesis platform, the core technology we’ve been developing for the past four years.

Primal Fusion is still in private alpha testing. If you’ve previously requested an invitation to our alpha, it’ll be heading your way very soon. If you’ve just heard of Primal Fusion and would like to learn more, check out our press release below. Then request an account so you can try it first-hand.

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We’re only a month away from the launch of our thought networking service. On this blog, I’ve outlined our vision of thought networking as a new category of semantic applications. With thought networking, we want to help consumers effortlessly collect their thoughts and bend the Internet around them. Leading up to our launch, I want to summarize our vision for this service and our motivations for creating it.

Addressing a Pervasive Problem

The problem with today’s Internet is that it is imposed on consumers. Information is organized for them in advance, without their input. Consumers are treated not as individuals but as amorphous collections of audiences. Producers spend massive amounts of money trying to guess what their audiences need, and compensate for the gaps with monolithic websites and complicated tools to sift through it all.

A much better approach would put the horse in front of the cart, allowing individual consumers to dictate how the information should be organized for them. Simply ask them, “What are you thinking about?” and make those thoughts the organizing force behind it all. Computers could then wield these concrete representations of our thoughts to reorganize and reconstitute the information for each individual. Producers save money; consumers get the simple, made-to-order Web they deserve.

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Antisocial networks like Snubster began as parody; a backlash against large social networks and our fatigue in managing virtual “friends” we barely know. But there are far more powerful and systemic trends leading towards true antisocial networks. The question of where social networking is heading and where it ends is important for anyone investing or venturing online. Paradoxically, the biggest and most valuable networks will be the ones that can deal effectively with the smallest things.

My previous venture builds and manages large-scale communities. There we witnessed a constant churn of community members into smaller cliques. Even though the communities are focused on very specific interests, namely individual recording artists, cliques form around every topic imaginable, most having nothing to do with music at all.

Large networks like Facebook or LinkedIn face this fragmentation on a massive scale. But even the narrowest social network is not immune. Any service that’s organized around a static activity or interest will become fragmented as its membership grows. The reason is that the very organizing bases for social networks, the foundations for their existence, are constantly changing from within.

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At DEMO last month, I attended a panel of world-class experts on the question, Where the Web is Going: Web 2.0, 3.0, and Beyond (video). Here, I want to draw your attention to a portion of the discussion that touched on a truly new type of network. It included a personal testimony to a form of thought networking, many years in the making, and a glimpse into a future where digital thoughts are liberated from documents and social networks.

Past: Connecting People

Jon Udell was addressing the social dimension of the Web and its powerful influence on knowledge acquisition. We don’t just interact with this “global encyclopaedia”, he explained. People discover each other through the intersections of documents they create. “As people expose aspects of their thought process in tangible form as documents, human connections are made.”

“Absolutely perfect,” replied Howard Bloom, but unfortunately, a terribly protracted process. “When we try to find each other, and try to find the knowledge we get from each other, these days it’s as difficult as getting from New York to California in 1848.”

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Our thoughts are fleeting and immaterial, this mysterious stuff that’s locked away in our heads. Painstakingly, we collect our thoughts and transform them into words and documents. This transformation from thought into action is time-consuming and expensive. Thinking is a decidedly “offline” and manual process.

What would happen if you could instead make your thoughts tangible and concrete? What if you could collect your thoughts as readily as you can search online? What if your thoughts could self-organize around your tasks while you’re off doing other things? Thought networking is the idea that’s driving our efforts at Primal Fusion to explore these big questions.

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