***APOLOGIES FRO RECEIPT OF DUPLICATE POSTINGS*** Colleagues/ Our Facebook Friend Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington is interviewed in the Feb 3 2008 NYTimes about Twine "a revolutionary new way to share, organize, and find information" [ http://www.twine.com/ ]. /Gerry NYTimes |February 3, 2008 | Novelties An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots By ANNE EISENBERG HOW often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item? If the answer is *too often,* a San Francisco company, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents. Twine (twine.com) can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize. Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context. Customers have individual accounts on Twine*s Web site, where they save URLs or other information. They can make their collections, or *twines,* private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines public. [snip] Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web - foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely answer direct questions. Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, became a member of Twine*s test group in November, partly because she and her husband, Ethan, a doctoral candidate, needed a place to organize all the documents they wanted to share with each other about teaching and learning. For More Of The Story (and Photos) ... Visit [ http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/02/twine-semantic-web-is-here.... ] /Gerry Gerry McKiernan Associate Professor Science and Technology Librarian Iowa State University Library Ames IA 50011 gerrymck@iastate.edu There is Nothing More Powerful Than An Idea Whose Time Has Come Victor Hugo [ http://www.blogger.com/profile/09093368136660604490 ] Iowa: Where the Tall Corn Flows and the (North)West Wind Blows ... [ http://www.alternativeenergyblogs.blogspot.com/ ]