Tomorrow’s New York Times has a very positive story on Twine in the business section, An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots.

“How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item? If the answer is “too often,” a San Francisco company, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents.”

Happily, the story mentions that Twine is using Semantic Web technology:

“Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web — foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely answer direct questions.”

Late this week Google released the Google social graph API which provides structured access to information Google’s has extracted from public FOAF and XFN data on the Web. Google also says it mines the web for “and other publicly declared connections”. I wonder what that means? Brad Fitzpatrick gives a three minute explanation in this video. This is exciting and likely to give a push to any number of emerging themes, including data portability, linked data, and the Semantic Web in general. There’s lots of comment from the ususal suspects and also on the SWIG IRC

By the way, he will give an invited talk at the 2008 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media at the end of March in Seattle.

Here’s a simple call to the API starting with the ebiquity blog

  http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/lookup?q=ebiquity.umbc.edu%2Fblogger%2F&fme=1&pretty=1

You can see from the results that they are returned using JSON. The possible parameters and what they mean are given here.

Fastcompany has a long article, Is the Tipping Point Toast?, on social-network researcher Duncan Watts, who’s on leave from his position as Professor of Sociology at Columbia and working for Yahoo Research. The article focuses on Watt’s challenges to the importance of “influentials” typified by Maclom Gladwell’s popular book, The Tipping Point.

“In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo –has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.” link

According to the article, Watts work at Yahoo Research is refining the concept of big-seed marketing that he and Jonah Peretti proposed in a note in HBR, Viral Marketing for the Real World. The idea is to marry “viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing”.

Outside.in is another site that shows news, civic information and blogs posts relevant to a location. See the outside.in site for Catonsville MD, the area around UMBC for an example.

A VC blog calls this a hyperlocal site. (They are an investor). It’s similar to everyblock but it covers nearly 12,000 cities instead of three. The coverage, however, does not seem as deep.

They recognize the location of a blog posts as follows. A blogger registers he feed with outside.in and they monitor the posts. She geotags blog posts with the a location using one of four methods: (1) a link to a Google map with the location, (2) a blog category or tag that looks like a Zip code, (3) an inline text tag like or [where 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250], or (4) geoRSS

Everyblock launched yesterday as a site that shows you news and other item that are about or relevant to your neighborhood. You enter your address, postal code or neighborhood name and see news articles, civic documents like crime reports and building permits, blog posts, craigslist entries, Yelp reviews, and Flickr photos associated with the area around it.

Currently only three cities are covered by everyblock — New York, Chicago and San Francisco. For an example, see the everyblock page for NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood or around the University of Chicago.

I suspect that much of the work that goes into a system like everyblock is selecting the right sources. For example, how you access online local government documents for each state or city will differ. You would want to mine the local newspapers for news items and focusing on them would make disambiguating geonames and addresses easy, since your first order approximation would be that every geo-reference is local. There is also work in adapting to the APIs for other services, like Yelp and craigslist, that each has its own way to sorting items into geographic regions.

There are good data sources for the GIS information and services, free or paid, that will do the geocoding and reverse geocoding of names and addresses. The Earth is a finite place and we have a lot of data about what is where, at least in the more developed parts of it.

Although everyblock claims to include relevant blog posts, I’ve not seen any yet. This is a harder problem, unless you get bloggers to add explicit geographic metadata or register their blogs with a location, like feedmap.org does.

The success of social media sites like Facebook, Youtube, Myspace, and Flickr reflect a change in the way people use the Web. Current estimates are that over one third of all new material being added to the Web is user-generated content from sites like these.

Business leaders and VCs have taken note, and this is probably the most active area for new Internet startups and new ventures from established businesses. There’s a demand for people who understand the phenomenon, the technologies that make it work and the new technologies that will enable the next wave of successful services and sites. Who knows, maybe you can be the next Mark Zuckerberg. (If you do, please remember your alma mater.)

If you are still looking for a course to round out your Spring schedule, you might consider CMSC 491S/691S — ‘Social Web Technologies’. This special topics course will meet MW 7:10-8:25pm and be taught by Dr. Harry Chen, who received his Ph.D. from UMBC in 2004. For format will be seminar-style and project-oriented. It will cover (1) how social web technologies such as blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, photo/video sharing and folksonomies can improve the productivity of people and (2) how to apply the latest Web technologies (e.g., Machine learning, text mining, RDF, PhP, GIS, SOA, Javascript) to create social web applications. More information.

Alan Kay got it right when he said “Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.” — a quote I’d not heard until I saw it on danah boyd’s blog recently. She cited it to explain why today’s youth find it so natural to use Internet technology while their parents find it a bit strange and artificial.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a report on Teens and Social Media with the tag line “The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media”.

“Some 93% of teens use the Internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction — a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others.
    The Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.
    Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Male teens, however, do dominate one area — posting of video content online. Online boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online where others could see it.”

The Kay quote reminds me of Arthur C. Clark’s third law:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

although I am not sure anyone really sees blogging as magic. Maybe it’s not yet sufficiently advanced.

Technorati founder David Sifry launched a new service last week, when everyone was recovering from one holiday and preparing for another. Hoosgot (Who’s got …) let’s you ask the collective Blogosphere by posting a question on your blog or on the Twitter microblogging system. You need to include the term hoosgot in your blog post and @hoosgot in your twitter update to have it noticed.

Sifry explanation of how Hoosgot happened reinforces my belief that the greatest skill a practical computer scientist can have is being able to quickly test a new idea by turning it into running code.

“You gotta love Holiday Weekends. Friday night (the 28th) The lazyweb popped back into my mind. I missed it. I started asking myself the question, “Why hasn’t anyone reconstituted the lazyweb?, What if we could rebuild the lazyweb for the 2008 web? What if we could take advantage of all the cool tools that have arrived in the last 5 years? Would it work?” Rather than wait around, I realized I could just build it, and maybe folks like me would use it. At about 5am on Saturday morning, the first prototype was up. I made some major changes, including twitter support Saturday night. And launch is today, on Sunday morning! Ain’t working on the web fun?:-)” (link)

Of course it helped that he could tweak Technorati to collect blog posts and tweets.

Will it work? Hooknows. One problem is spam, and Sifry is well positioned to deal with this. The other is that the wisdom of crowds is not uniform. Since your Hoosgot query is going out to a very broad group, a narrow question on an obscure aspect of Java programming will be a head scratcher to most. If you ask the blogmob for a movie recommendation, they will tell you to go see Norbit, which was 2007’s 29th highest grossing movie but also so unredeamably horrible that it almost killed Eddie Murphy’s career.

There are some possible things that could address these problems. Learning to spot Hoosgot spam and automatically adjust the model as it evolves is one. Another is to classify the Hoosgot queries by intent, topic and geography. Both of these are made more difficult if the queries are short, as they will be for Twitter-based queries. We’ve dealt with some of this in Akshay Java’s recent work on analyzing Twitter updates (
Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities).

(viaReadWriteWeb)

A Computer Science special topics seminar on Social Web Technologies will be offered at UMBC this Spring and is open to both graduate and upper level undergraduate students. The course is CMSC 491s/691s and will meet MW 7:10-8:25pm. Enrolment will be limited. The instructor is Dr. Harry Chen, who received his Ph.D. from UMBC in 2004.

This seminar-style course will cover (1) how social web technologies such as blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, photo/video sharing and folksonomies can improve the productivity of people and (2) how to apply the latest Web technologies to create social web applications. For more information, see

The New York Times has incorporated Blogrunner into it’s Web site. Techcrunch characterizes Blogrunner as a Techmeme Killer

“Last night, the New York Times quietly launched Blogrunner on the technology section of its main site. Blogrunner was one of many Techmeme copycat sites, until the New York Times bought it last year. Like Techmeme, Blogrunner is a service that keeps track of the latest news and blog posts on a range of topics (Politics, Technology, Media, Business, Economy, Law, Health, Movies, Books, Religion, Iraq, Entertainment). Now those links are appearing on the New York Time’s main site, starting with the technology section, in a middle column titled “Technology Headlines from Around the Web.” (link)

Here’s the NYT Bits blog on Blogrunner:

“The biggest change is the feature in the middle column of the technology page titled “Technology Headlines From Around the Web.” It presents a constantly updated list of hot technology stories. Notice what we are not worried about. … Even more interesting to me is how this list gets generated. It is mainly created by an automated algorithm developed by Philippe Lourier, the developer of Blogrunner, a Web site The New York Times Co. bought last year. It has something in common with Digg, the site on which readers vote on what articles they find interesting. But for Blogrunner, votes are links from blogs or other Web sites. This approach, of course, is what powers the PageRank algorithm of Google, and Techmeme, an excellent technology news site. (link)

I wonder what is taught at J Schools about this these days.

Predictify is a new web-based prediction market that was mentioned in a Freakonomics post this week.

“Predictify provides a simple, fun way to engage in current and future newsworthy topics. Users can find events that interest them, predict the outcome, build a reputation based on accuracy, and even get paid real money when they’re right (tell me more). Best of all, it’s free – no points or bets required.” (link)

Registered users can make predictions in answer to a question and develop a reputation for accuracy. Anyone can ask a free question that is limited to 100 results all of which are public. You have to put up money (at least $100US) to ask a Premium question, which can receive up to 10K answers ($1/each) which remain private. People who answer a premium question may get a payout that’s a function of the total payout amount, their answer’s accuracy and their Predictify level. Predictify users advance through the levels (Beginner, Apprentice, Scholar, Expert, and Guru) w.r.t. different topical categories by making accurate predictions.

Her’s an example of a current question in the Pop Culture category with a payout pot of $1000 — on the US television show The Office, which of the couples Jan&Michael and Pam&Jim will still be together on November 16th?

Finally, a way to cash in on all those hours you thought were wasted in front of the tube and Intertubes.

The W3C’s RDF-in-HTML task force has been wrestling with the problem developing recommended ways to embed RDF content in XHTML documents. I think that this is incredibly important as many of the use cases for the Semantic Web can benefit from documents that have both human and machine readable portions. RDF-in-HTML is actually a joint task force of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment and HTML Working Groups. Last week, the task force released a new version of the primer on RDF/A, is a set of attributes used to embed RDF in XHTML. It’s a good document to read to get an idea of how this will work.