DEMO 09: A Smarter Internet

[dhilipkumar]

DEMO 09: A Smarter Internet

DEMO 09 sessions started with presentations on "a smarter Internet," with most of the tools focusing on delivering faster or better information. I need to leave DEMO a little early this year due to travel schedules, but I did have a chance to see the products at the exposition hall, and found a number of them quite interesting.

Ensembli tries to help you find information on the topics you are interested in. You pick a topic you want to follow and then typically some specific keywords to narrow it down, and the system collects RSS feeds from across the Internet and sorts the results based on your interests. I can see where the concept would be interesting to a student tyring to organize thoughts for a paper, or someone new to a topic, though my initial impression was that most of the results weren't particularly deep or broad.

Evri has been around for a while, collecting related information about the things you read online; for instance, now includes links to related stories from the paper and elsewhere on the Web in a module created by the company. What's new here is that you can now go to the Evri site and set up "collections" - a way to constantly follow a topic or person online. You can then annotate and share the collection. The company calls it "applying social media to the semantic web." It seems simple, but useful. In addition, the company is launching a new toolbar that adds the Evri related links to anything you're reading online. Again, it doesn't quite have all the information I'm looking for, but it does have a lot, and it's a very cool idea.

Purewire Trust is an Web site for verifying the identity and trustworthiness of people and Web sites online. You can go to the site and type in a person (typically an e-mail address), place (Web site address), or thing (such as a download), and immediate get information about that person, place or thing. These include a reputation score, user ratings, and information about Web sites; and similar information about people (if the address is included in various social networks, etc.) I can see where this could be useful.

Qubes showed GagaPost, a sytem that makes it easier to collaborate with others in the creation of Web posts. Multiple people can work together on a Web post that then can appear on multiple blogs; and you can place in-line remarks on this blogs as well. There's a client for PCs and certain mobile devices. It looks nice, although a bit unfinished.