Blog
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Innovation turns brain drain into brain gain
Excerpt from The Waterloo Region Record, Technology Spotlight 2011 By Chuck Howitt, The Record Two years ago Tony Sarris was living the American dream. He was an engineering director for Unisys, a large U.S. information technology company with 37,000 employees worldwide. He lived in…
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Where Big Data Fails…and Why
Data-driven technologies are plagued with small data problems. Their performance suffers in markets that aggregate a large number of unique interests. Some of the largest markets share these small data characteristics, including local ecommerce, personalized media, and interest networking. New approaches are needed that…
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Content curation needs to be simpler
In the early days of the Web, librarians would often compile directories of “trusted sites” on a range of important topics. In fact, Yahoo! has its roots in what was essentially a human-edited directory of online content — then called David and Jerry’s Guide…
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Why the Web Needs Automating
Technology was supposed to revolutionize our lives. There were promises of 20-hour work weeks, robotic servants to do our bidding, and leisurely weekday afternoons in the sun. That was a fantastic dream. So what happened along the way? Today, we face the grim reality…
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Antisocial Networking: How Small (and Valuable) Can Social Networks Get?
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…
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Interest Networks Don’t Need to Socialize
Here’s a glimpse into a future where interest networks are liberated from documents and social networks. Past: Connecting People The social dimension of the Web imparts a powerful influence on knowledge acquisition. People discover each other through the intersections of documents they create. Unfortunately,…
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An Introduction to Interest Networking
Our interests are fleeting and immaterial, this mysterious stuff that’s locked away in our heads. Painstakingly, we collect our interests and transform them into words and documents. This transformation from interests into action is time-consuming and expensive, a decidedly “offline” and manual process. What…
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The Semantic Web Isn’t Just a Data Web
The Semantic Web has a branding problem: It was built to manage data, not semantics. Somewhere along the line, insiders renamed it the “Data Web”. That was a great move for Web researchers, but what will the semantics crowd do with the name? Just…
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The World’s First Mainstream Semantic Web
The vast majority of semantic technologists are directing their efforts to search. It’s an important use of their talents; search is a hard problem worth solving. But it seems to me that we need to take a broader view. Semantics is the stuff of…
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No Need to Argue Personal Semantics
In December 2006, James Kim and his family were stranded, their car stuck in heavy snow. After a week, fearing for their survival, James headed out into the wilderness to find help. In the dead of winter, he was wearing nothing but street clothes.…
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A Made-To-Order Web
The Web suffers a fundamental problem. Search is a symptom of it. Surfing is a symptom of it. Even the website itself is a symptom of it. The problem is that content is organized for you, in advance. Pre-packaged content is like ordering off…