Making sense of stuff with Twine and the Semantic Web
Posted by Michael | Filed under Site
Interesting article by Clive Thompson over at Wired.com about “New Web Apps for Coping With Information Overload.”
I had promised my editor that I’d send in a cool idea for my next column. So I was trolling through the thousands of news tips and blog posts I’d archived using services like del.icio.us. But I was drowning; I’d saved so much that I could no longer find the really good stuff. What I needed was some help — an assistant to do some sifting for me.
In my cursory understanding, Twine (currently in invite-only beta) takes the idea of social networks and moves them from being just about connecting with other people who share similar interests (a network that is somewhat inwardly-facing, mostly friends and friends of friends), to connecting to new content and collaborating within a network of other people (outwardly-facing) who share in your content interests based on the stuff that you feed into Twine. From there, Twine is able to provide more targeted recommendations about which you — and others within your network — may be interested. Or, as Clive states, Twine “…rifles through bookmarks and documents you feed it, extracts the core concepts, and then finds relevant new stuff for you to look at it.”
In terms of making life simpler, Twine seems to address the issue of deciding how and what to tag the accumulated files and bookmarks on your computer. Further, no matter how careful you are in organizing, your system only matters to you and is only as good as you can make it. Tagging helps you to identify files, but doesn’t do much in terms of helping you to articulate different content into more meaningful sets of information. And if you stray from your tagging system, the system soon breaks-down. Built-in search capability helps to locate files, but it cannot help you contextualize and build upon the things that are relevant to you buried somewhere in the blob of stuff on your hard drive.
With this said, why not let the cloud help you out? The cliche, “A thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters…” works here; not that we’re trying to write the next great play, but as we’ve seen with Wikipedia, the more like-minded people you throw at a problem, the more likely we are to start making sense of stuff. In terms of Twine and your content, not only does Twine seem to help in sorting it semantically instead of arbitrarily, it has the added bonus build upon your content new sources of related information that you’d have otherwise missed (or just never know about).
I have yet to play with Twine, but it’s possibilities are intriguing, especially in the academic sector, where the sharing of knowledge and content among faculty and students is in desperate need of an overhaul.
Although I may be completely off, Twine seems to pick up from where del.icio.us leaves off (particularly with the idea of tagging) and smacks head-on into the untapped potential of social network services + the emerging Semantic Web (here’s how Twine approaches this). I dare make a comparison to Amazon.com’s recommendations tool (You may also like… / Other people viewed… / Other people also purchased…), from which I’ve purchased many items I’d had never seen otherwise (and my bank account reminds me of this abuse every month…). I’ve never met these “Other People,” nor would I call them friends, but based on what we feed into Amazon as we browse and purchase, it turns out that we have a lot in common. Put another way according to Clive, “But the truth is, sometimes social connections are less useful than semantic ones.”
Tags: del.icio.us, Semantic Web, social networks, tagging, Twine
