Nova Spivack

KurzweilAI.net reported that

Nova Spivack has proposed a collective self-awareness Web service that is like a “Google Zeitgeist” on steroids, but with a lot more real-time, interactive, participatory data, technology and features in it.
 
The goal is to measure and visualize the state of the collective mind of humanity, and provide this back to humanity in as close to real-time as is possible, from as many data sources as we can handle.
 
For example, this system would discover and rank the current most timely and active topics, current events, people, places, organizations, events, products, articles, websites, in the world right now. From these topics it would link to related resources, discussions, opinions, etc. It would also provide a real-time mass opinion polling system, where people could start polls, vote on them, and see the results in real-time. And it would provide real-time statistics about the Web, the economy, the environment, and other key indicators. The idea is to try to visualize the global mind — to make it concrete and real for people, to enable them to see what it is thinking, what is going on, and where they fit in it — and to enable them to start adapting and guiding their own behavior to it.

Nova Spivack is President & CEO of Radar Networks, a stealth-mode software company funded by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital that is developing a new semantic platform and online service for next-generation group communications and collaboration.
 
In 1994 Nova cofounded one of the first commercial Internet ventures, EarthWeb, and brought it public in 1998. EarthWeb created Developer.com, which was the leading portal for IT professionals. Many parts of EarthWeb’s content business were sold at the end of the Web 1.0 bubble, and today, what remained continues to function as Dice.com, the leading job board for technology professionals.
 
Nova is author of the blog Minding the Planet. He produced the first Web sites for the New York Stock Exchange, Bertelsmann Music Club, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other large clients.
 
He has also worked with Thinking Machines, Xerox/Kurzweil, and Individual, as a programmer, marketer and analyst and has advised and angel-invested in several early-stage advanced technology startups through Lucid Ventures, his early-stage venture development company.
 
Nova has consulted to SRI International and Sarnoff Labs, to form their incubator, nVention, and more recently has worked on ontologies, software architectures and user-interfaces for the Semantic Web with SRI and DARPA on the CALO project — a major initiative to develop next-generation agents for learning, collaboration and knowledge work assistance.
 
He is the grandson of Peter F. Drucker and shares strong interests in improving group cognition, innovation, and knowledge work.
 
Nova studied philosophy with a focus on artificial intelligence, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, at Oberlin. He has done independent cellular-automata and complex systems research at MIT, and he did graduate study at The International Space University, which led to his flight to the edge of space and zero gravity training in Russia in 1999.