Two very different opinions were voiced.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch:
“I’ve traditionally been a fan of Google News, but I now consider Google News slow,” he said. “You used to read the New York Times for news, now you read it for analysis of things you already know about. If you just follow the right people on Twitter, you hear about things reported from on site in real time.”
“Human rights standards are now relatively established and no one wants to be known as a mass murderer. No one even wants to be known as a torturer of political prisoners. But we know that there’s a gap between what governments say and what they do. That gap is where we find our power. We shame those governments. Our capacity to do that is based on wireless technology. The more real-time we can respond to government actions, the more power we have to influence them. That real time capacity is based on wireless technology.”

Human Rights Watch:
http://www.hrw.org/

CTIA (International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry)
http://ctia.org/

See also: “Rights Watchdog Says Mobile Web Would Have Changed Nazi Germany”
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rights_watchdog_says_mobile_web_would_have_changed.php

Support in english and german language, services and additional modules are available from Stefan Schmollack Consulting
http://schmollack.net/
(other languages coming soon)

commerce:SEO v2 Community Edition is a free search engine optimization shop system written in PHP released under the terms of the GNU GPL and based on xt:Commerce and thus based on osCommerce.

Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine (http://www.twine.com/), have been acquired by Evri (http://corporate.evri.com/about-us/). TechCrunch broke the story here (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/11/evri-acquires-radar-networks/).

This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

As the CEO and founder of Radar Networks and Twine.com, I am both happy and relieved to have reached this milestone during what has been a difficult time of global recession. I am very proud of my team and the incredible work and accomplishments that we have made together, and I am grateful for the unflagging support of our investors, and the huge community of Twine users and supporters.

Selling Twine.com was not something we had planned on doing at this time, but given the economy and the fact that Twine.com is a long-term project that will require significant ongoing investment and work to reach our goals, it is the best decision for the business and our shareholders.

While we received several offers for the company, from multiple industry leaders in media, search and social software, we eventually selected Evri because not only did they make us the best offer, but we also felt Evri was the closest strategic and cultural fit to our mission and vision for Twine (note: Evri’s lead investor is Vulcan Capital, which is also the lead investor in Twine). Will Hunsinger, the CEO of Evri, and I have been speaking about the potential for teaming up since last year, and this deal made good sense for both companies.

The Twine team is joining Evri to continue our work there. Twine.com’s data and users are safe and sound and will be transitioned into the Evri.com service over time. This process will be done in a manner that protects privacy and data, and is minimally disruptive. I have great faith in the team at Evri and believe they will handle this with great care and respect for the Twine community.

It is always an emotional experience to sell a company. Building Twine.com has been a long, intense, challenging, rewarding, and all-consuming effort. There were incredible highpoints and some very deep lows along the way. But most of all, it has been an adventure I will never forget. I was fortunate to help pioneer a major new technology — the Semantic Web — with an incredible team, including many good friends. Bringing something as big, as ambitious, and as risky as Twine.com to market was exhilarating.

Twine has been one of the great learning experiences of my life. I am profoundly grateful to everyone I’ve worked with, and especially to those who supported us financially and personally with their moral support, ideas and advocacy.

I am also grateful to unsung heroes behind the project — the families of all of us who worked on it, who never failed to be supportive as we worked days, nights, weekends and vacations to bring Twine to market.

[...]

What is Nova Spivack going to do next?

I will be continuing to advise Evri going forward, but will not be working full-time there. Instead, I will be turning my primary focus to several new projects, including some exciting new ventures:

Live Matrix (http://livematrix.com/), a new venture that I co-founded with Sanjay Reddy (CEO of Live Matrix; formerly SVP of Corp Dev for Gemstar TV Guide). We will be announcing Live Matrix and providing first public details at SXSW, this weekend. We’re going to give the Web a new dimension: time. More news about this soon.

Klout (http://klout.com/), the leading provider of social analytics about influencers on Twitter and Facebook (which I was the first angel investor in, and which I now advise). Klout is a really hot company and it’s growing fast.

I’m starting a new early-stage fund with an innovative business model. It’s part incubator, part fund, part production company. Through this fund, my partners and I are planning to produce a number of original startups, and selected outside startups as well. There is a huge gap in the early-stage arena, and to fill this we need to modify the economics and model of early stage venture investing.

I’m working on a book about major cultural shifts that are taking place, thanks in part to the real-time Web. And I’m looking forward to traveling and speaking about this topic widely in the coming year.

I’m looking forward to working more on my non-profit interests, particularly those related to supporting democracy and human rights around the world (http://www.challengepost.com/challenge/unblockable-anonymous-encrypted-mobile-interenet-a), and one of my particular interests, Tibetan cultural preservation.

And last but not least, I’m getting married later this month, which may turn out to be my best project of all.

If you want to keep up with what I am thinking about and working on, you should follow me on Twitter at @novaspivack (http://twitter.com/novaspivack), and also keep up with my blog here at novaspivack.com (http://novaspivack.com/) and my mailing list (accessible in the upper right hand corner of this page).

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/evri-ties-the-knot-with-twine

Note that as well as mapping a possible future of the Web, here I am also proposing that the Web x.0 terminology be used to index the decades of the Web since 1990. Thus we are now in the tail end of Web 2.0 and are starting to lay the groundwork for Web 3.0, which fully arrives in 2010.

– Nova Spivack, February 09, 2007
http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2007/02/steps_towards_a.html

Web x.0 roadmap by Nova Spivack

The article covers the topics Intelligent Web, Openness, Interoperability, A Global Database, 3D Web & Beyond, Control of Information, and Semantic Web versus Web 3.0.

Cho concludes:

Nova Spivack’s Twine is one of the first online services to use Web 3.0 technologies. Its goal is to organize, share and discover information about a user’s interests in networks of like-minded people. Using semantic technologies, and powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about users’ specific interests and makes recommendations. The more users use Twine, the better the service gets to know its users and the more useful it becomes. Twine is an example of Web 3.0 at work, combining the social elements of Web 2.0 with user-specific Semantic Web tools.

http://internet.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_web_30

The rise of social media such as blogs and social networks has fuelled interest in sentiment analysis. With the proliferation of reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency for businesses looking to market their products, identify new opportunities and manage their reputations. As businesses look to automate the process of filtering out the noise, understanding the conversations, identifying the relevant content and actioning it appropriately, many are now looking to the field of sentiment analysis. If web 2.0 was all about democratizing publishing, then the next stage of the web may well be based on democratizing data mining of all that content that’s getting published.

The problem is that most sentiment analysis algorithms rely on us using simple terms to express our sentiment about a product or service. However, cultural factors, linguistic nuances and differing contexts make it extremely difficult to turn a string of written text into a simple pro or con sentiment. The fact that humans often disagree on the sentiment of text illustrates how big a task it is for computers to get this right. The shorter the string of text, the harder it becomes.

Some experts believe that the key to accurate sentiment analysis is accurate text analysis. Rather than relying on counting ‘good’ or ‘bad’ words that appear across an entire text, this approach uses a deep syntactic analysis of each and every word. OpenAmplify is one such example, which has opened an online developer community for collaboration and innovation related to the semantic web. It is the only generally available web service that can identify sentiment and guidance from text. As such, it is allowing open access to its patented natural language processing technology (NLP).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis#Sentiment_analysis_and_Web_3.0

“People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”

– Tim Berners-Lee, 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web#Web_3.0

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/technology/23iht-web.html?_r=1

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

Watch the video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

Filmed Feb 2009,  posted Mar 2009

About TED

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker “ideas worth spreading,” talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. Indeed, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been reengineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world’s most inspiring voices.

Stefan D. Schmollack

Hello,

my name is Stefan Schmollack and today I have started this Weblog at NextGenerationWeb.Net about the Next Generation of the Internet, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and the Evolution of the Internet.

Yours sincerely,

Stefan D. Schmollack

Stefan Schmollack Consulting

http://schmollack.net/