Two days ago I got Spocked! I'm impressed with their approach to solving the identity crisis:
- Index as many external "people" sites (linkedin, plaxo, address books from the largest webmail providers, DBLP bibliography database, etc., etc.)
- Let users invite each other into trust networks
- Let users tag each other with relevant attributes
- Let users vote on tags
- Allow users to tag relations -- i.e., assert a relation between two different people. Other than in Freebase I haven't seen this, but Spock is much more liberal, allowing any type of relation (with the flip side of not establishing inverse relations).
- Use all the resulting metrics (believability of a tag based on votes, authority of a user based on number of correct tags, social metric of people according to relations with other people and their authority) to create an equivalent to pagerank (Spock Power)
- And the kicker; allow users to merge records about people
Obviously the latter one is a huge contributor to solving the identity crisis using collective intelligence. I think Spock recognizes the power of particularly that type of contribution because after I merged a couple of records about people I know, my Spock power went from 161 to 1729!
There has been a lot of discussion on the (lack of) ethics of the Spock team here and obviously they will have major hurdles fighting spam, but the Spock uri (e.g. mine is http://www.spock.com/Jasper-Kamperman-z32I1yG ) might become a pretty usable online identity.
But being in the top 1% of users after only two hours of tagging and merging and the top 1000 leader board having scores as low as 2,500 leads me to believe their number of users is less than a million -- which includes a lot of europeans. So they don't appear to cover a very large part of the web just yet.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
Solving the identity crisis
Will the large scale Semantic Web ever happen? As in a significant portion of the web explicitly annotated with classes, taxonomies, properties, even microformats? I'm not holding my breath, and a lot of implicit webbers with me.
Just consider how hard it is to design a sound ontology. How much harder it is to standardize on one ontology. Or to map between ontologies. Then imagine how all web publishers are going to deal with those issues. Hundreds of millions of them, including you and me.
Implicit webbers don't wait for publishers. We like shallow taxonomies and we guess if we need to. And of course we'll accept any help we can get, even if it's labeled "semantic web".
Some of that help may come from OKKAM. These people seem to have found a tractable corner of the Semantic Web. Here's my take on their recipe:
I wonder if or when they'll have an OpenSocial adapter .. imagine the possibilities!
Just consider how hard it is to design a sound ontology. How much harder it is to standardize on one ontology. Or to map between ontologies. Then imagine how all web publishers are going to deal with those issues. Hundreds of millions of them, including you and me.
Implicit webbers don't wait for publishers. We like shallow taxonomies and we guess if we need to. And of course we'll accept any help we can get, even if it's labeled "semantic web".
Some of that help may come from OKKAM. These people seem to have found a tractable corner of the Semantic Web. Here's my take on their recipe:
- Forget about classes, taxonomies, properties and description logics and build a service for just identity -- a taxonomy doesn't get flatter than that.
- Create a unique ID for Jasper Kamperman. Resist the temptation to classify him as a Person, Male, Musician, Dutchman, Sunnyvale-dweller, Computer Scientist, Openwater Architect. Don't try to maintain his current phone number, address or affiliation. Don't send him email to "update his ecard".
- But do record that jasper@cwi.nl, jasper.kamperman@cwi.nl, jasper.kamperman@idr.nl, jasper.kamperman@reasoning.com, jasper.kamperman@intel.com, Jasper F. Th. Kamperman, Jasper Kamperman, PhD, http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasperk64 , jasperk64 at yahoo dot com, and jasper dot kamperman at openwaternet dot com all refer to the same entity.
I wonder if or when they'll have an OpenSocial adapter .. imagine the possibilities!
Friday, November 2, 2007
Along came the Implicit Web
A conference about the implicit web inspired me to finally start this blog. The concept isn't very well defined yet, but then again, how much fun would that be?
"Implicit Web" caught my attention because it captures so well what we're doing at Openwater -- building service networks that connect people and information to create better service.
And right there you have an example; how do you know if service is better? That's simple, you conduct a survey. Or do you? Well, I don't know about you, but personally, I detest surveys. And I get really mad at software like WebEx's Meeting Manager that insists on a survey after every single meeting. And rating those movies on Netflix gets old quickly, too. Surveys are annoying exactly because they require you to be explicit.
So how about analyzing service network activity and creating implicit measures of quality?
Take online forums: How long does it take for a question to get an answer? Is it really an answer? How many people read that answer? How many people link to it? Does anyone write "thank you"? Do they come back?
Or take a technique called Search Analytics, explained eloquently here by Gery Angel. How often do users type slight variations of a search query? How many queries return any results at all? Do users click the first, the second or the third search result?
There are endless possibilities in measuring service quality alone, which in itself is only a small but necessary part of what we do. Which brings me back to the reason for starting this blog -- "implicit web" seems to cover a whole swath of subjects we're working on at Openwater. Stay tuned for more.
"Implicit Web" caught my attention because it captures so well what we're doing at Openwater -- building service networks that connect people and information to create better service.
And right there you have an example; how do you know if service is better? That's simple, you conduct a survey. Or do you? Well, I don't know about you, but personally, I detest surveys. And I get really mad at software like WebEx's Meeting Manager that insists on a survey after every single meeting. And rating those movies on Netflix gets old quickly, too. Surveys are annoying exactly because they require you to be explicit.
So how about analyzing service network activity and creating implicit measures of quality?
Take online forums: How long does it take for a question to get an answer? Is it really an answer? How many people read that answer? How many people link to it? Does anyone write "thank you"? Do they come back?
Or take a technique called Search Analytics, explained eloquently here by Gery Angel. How often do users type slight variations of a search query? How many queries return any results at all? Do users click the first, the second or the third search result?
There are endless possibilities in measuring service quality alone, which in itself is only a small but necessary part of what we do. Which brings me back to the reason for starting this blog -- "implicit web" seems to cover a whole swath of subjects we're working on at Openwater. Stay tuned for more.
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