Re: Enquire - WWW - Semantic Desktop/PersonalDataWiki? do you agree?

Hi Leo,

I'm no Tim, but I found your message interesting, so I thought I'd chime in.

What you are trying to do, at the core, is encourage people to adopt an
innovation. To understand why they are resistant, and what measures you can
take to change that resistance, you might want to take a look at the book
Diffusion of Innovations.

I'm not sure whether people will fall for argument from authority. It does
appeal to a certain fundamental irrationality in people. However, I think
enough people understand the fallacious nature of this reasoning that it
will not be effective in many cases, particularly those cases where the
individual is not already inclined to agree with you.

Best and good luck,
Lin

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Leo Sauermann <leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com>wrote:

> Dear Tim,
> SWIG
>
>
> My Current Task is somehow tricky:
>
> I am pitching our company Gnowsis to investors. It makes an Enquire-Like
> Semantic Desktop, a personal semantic web. It seems investors
> only understand anything on the level of "we do twitter for dogs" or "it
> sells crowdsourced clothes via mobile phones".
>
>
> So Tim, as Elder of the Web, I turn to you for an expert opinion to
> reassure we do a useful thing.
>
>
> Here are the Statements I patch together from "weaving the web" etc.:
>
> Enquire - linking everything bidirectionally is an
> entire new way of writing.
> I guess you also realized that the system changes the way you look at
> things and your
> thinking.
>
> WWW - give everyone a tool (read/write) web that everyone
> can publish information. The links are first unidirectional and untyped
> and will be typed
> "later", once the RDF riddle was solved in 1999.
>
> SemanticDesktop/PersonalDataWikis/PersonalSemanticWeb - we finally give
> the peoples the
> Enquire that Tim already used in the distant and mysterious past.
> The first distributable results are NEPOMUK-KDE, PesonalDataWikis,
> Personal Data Lockers, and services around this idea of personal
> semantic web services for personal information management.
>
>
> The question:
> Tim,
> Is this THE idea?
>
> Do you agree this is a sensible thing to do?
>
>
>
> If yes, then my argumentation to investors and to myself is:
> "TimBl basically inventend blogging, wikipedia, and twitter with the
> idea of a read/write WWW, which it originally always included. You can
> trust that guy to be clever. You can also be assured this was around
> before, some ideas for millenia, some since Memex.
> Now Gnowsis works to realize the proto-idea - Enquire. There must be
> something going on here. Dear Investors, look at it, spend some time
> understanding what happens here with technology and then invest."
>
>
> Sometimes I feel like Frodo and together with Bernhard "Sam" Schandl we
> go alone to Mount Doom ("Microsoft Outlook") to finally throw the Ring
> of RDF into its center, to crack it open to the web. Then I see you guys
> over at the Minas Tirith of LinkedOpenData and data.gov and the battles
> Martin Hepp fights with GoodRelations and ... there is hope :-)
>
>
>
> ok, looking for interesting answers
> best
> Leo Sauermann, Dr.
> CEO and Founder
>
> mail: leo.sauermann@gnowsis.com
> mobile: +43 6991 gnowsis
> http://www.gnowsis.com
>
> helping people remember,
>
> so join our newsletter
> http://www.gnowsis.com/about/content/newsletter
> ____________________________________________________
>
>


-- 
Lin Clark
DERI, NUI Galway <http://www.deri.ie/>

lin-clark.com
twitter.com/linclark