A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in Newsweek on Qwiki.  It won the TechCrunch Disrupt award this year and I think it’s well deserved.  It advances searchability in another direction.

Currently in Alpha (you have to apply or I can invite you to join), there are a few (expected) bumps, but what they’ve done is pretty amazing.  Each “video” pulls together information from different Web sources on a given topic; over time it’ll include more sources.  The video talks and shows corresponding pictures to help explain the who, what, and where.  At the end of the video, it recommends other, related videos to watch.

I explored Los Angeles, my hometown, and learned a few new things about our weather patterns. Want to see a comic book example?  View the video below.

With this advancement, the Internet opens up the world to people in new ways.  Certainly, if I were planning a vacation to a new city, a resource like this would be useful.  But imagine its potential for interactive learning, for people who aren’t as computer savvy, for people with motor or visual impairments, etc.

I’m very excited by this advancement and look forward to what’s next.  It also makes me a little sad that my grandfather is no longer with us:  if he thought a fax machine was nifty, he would have loved this!!

Let me know if you’d like me to send you an invite.

Now I realize this may be old news to some, just as the WWW was when I got on board in 1993.  But in 1993, I bought the first Mac built for online connection, and the good folks at Apple took days to successfully get me online as it was still such a novelty.  So I’m thinking that Linked Data (also referred to as the Semantic Web) may still be an unknown idea to many of you as well.

Last May I was wowed by the concept behind Wolfram|Alpha, and I wrote on it here as it was launching.  Since then, I haven’t heard that much about it (it’s a private effort), and I personally don’t believe it works that well.

Linked Data, an open-source movement, is more likely to be the real start of the answer of how inter-relationships between data can be seen and accessed on the Web.

Simple, one-dimensional searches are fine today, but what happens when your query is complex?  Here’s an example I saw about football (I know, how unlike me!):  you want to know which football players went to the University of Texas, Austin and played for the Dallas Cowboys as cornerback.  What you’re really asking is that two databases – UT and Cowboys – talk to each other.  But unless they’re connected in some way, they can’t talk.  And that’s what Linked Data is all about – forming those connections through shared databases.  (To see more – for those of you who are tech-inclined – visit this link.)

Today, it’s a little cumbersome to “code” the data for these linked databases, but when it becomes more automated, it will be quite powerful  and I think more people and organizations will participate.  Currently,  the US government allows all federally collected data – data that we as taxpayers pay them to collect – to be shared across departments.  It’s early days, but visit www.data.gov to see what the US government is doing.  The Brits are also committed to this effort.

A company called Talis has a great example of how its platform is working for the BBC and I believe if you watch the short video, you’ll get excited about the potential of this new movement as an end-user.

What are the implications for other types of businesses? I can’t imagine they will share their proprietary information, but I do imagine that there will be “intranet-like” Linked Data resources where queries will merge public data with their private data and data from their vendors (such as agency media buys).  Internal politics regarding who “owns” which data sources may be the biggest hurdle for full adoption.

I know that there will be more to write on all of this over time, but I would highly recommend a blog post by Scott Brinker.  In his visual (below), you can see that he lays out seven business models going from indirect-to-direct revenue models and from ‘raw data’ delivery to ‘as an application’ delivery.

Are you as wowed as I am?  What are your thoughts?

The last paragraph really caught my attention as I had just participated in a creativity session last week.

“Science historian George Dyson believes the Internet’s flood of information has altered the process of creativity: what once required ‘collecting all available fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge’ now requires ‘removing or ignoring unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.’ Creativity by destruction rather than assembly.”

The image I got from this was of “sculpting knowledge.” As a qualitative researcher, identifying consumer insights has always been about sculpting knowledge.

What does this have to do with my brain online? Well, my brain has been overwhelmed lately. I had some downtime over the holidays and I signed up for even more newsletters and feeds. I now need to cut back. I need time to think. The Internet is causing, as Evgeny Morozov said in the same article, “the disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence.”

It’s like a swimmer’s lung capacity: a swimmer might be able to hold their breath for a long time, but they still have to come up for air. I need a breath – to sculpt, process, digest – whatever your metaphor.

So is the Web changing how I think? No, at best it’s impacting how I problem solve (as I’m able to seek out so much more information in this new way). It provides me with more to think about.

Creativity is an iterative, infinite process: from inspiration to output and back again. It’s likely we’ve always been “assembling” and “destroying.” Said another way, when we seek the “knowledge hidden within,” it’s always through the prism of our “framework of knowledge.”

What are your thoughts?