People often talk about how the social web makes the Internet seem like a small town, and now former VentureBeat and Valleywag editor Owen Thomas says he wants to give the web “its own hometown newspaper” called The Daily Dot. The site — which is still under wraps, with just an email sign-up form — is a new startup founded by Nova Spivack, former newspaper executive Nicholas White and PR consultant Josh Jones-Dilworth, and with recently-added Thomas as founding editor. All the group will say about is that the site will do “open-source journalism” and that it will treat the web like a community.

In an email that has also been posted online, Thomas says the site’s writers will “forge links not between pages but between people, and if we do our jobs well, we will find an audience that wants to help connect the dots.” In an interview with me on Friday, the former VentureBeat executive editor — who admitted he got a kick out of announcing the new site on April Fools’ Day — said he was initially skeptical of the idea, but as he talked more with the founders, he came to see it as an opportunity to get back to one of his first passions: namely, online community.

An early staffer at Suck.com, the highly-thought-of satirical spinoff from Wired magazine, Thomas says one thing he admired about the site was that it was aimed at digital natives — not covering them from afar, like most traditional media, but as part of that community. Much of what passes for media, he says, is still “repurposing and shovelling crap online and trying to make the old models work,” much like the Daily Dot’s almost-namesake, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily.

In terms of what the site will actually do, Thomas was frustratingly vague. He said crowdsourcing stories will be one part of it, but there will be traditional staff writers as well. He said initially there will be a newsletter, because newsletters “are retro — newsletters are cool again,” and eventually, the site will become a community of communities. As for the road map to get to that point, he said “the road map hasn’t really been defined yet.” Then he added:

Do I sound just like one those ***hole startup founders who’s cagey about everything? I hope so — that’s what I’m striving for.

Thomas is probably best known as the editor of Valleywag, a satirical — and occasionally nasty — site run by Nick Denton’s Gawker Media. After working at VentureBeat for the past year, Thomas said recently that he had gotten the entrepreneurial itch and wanted to start something new (which venture investor Paul Kedrosky quickly added to his list of top 10 reasons why we are in another technology bubble).

Spivack, meanwhile, is a serial entrepreneur and startup advisor who founded the early ISP EarthWeb in 1994 and then moved on to work with Stanford Research International and the DARPA artificial-intelligence project known as CALO. He also started one of the first attempts at using semantic technology to build an information-sharing network — a site called Twine – and is an advisor to a number of companies including Klout (Spivack’s bio notes that he has flown to the edge of space as a space tourist, and was also once a production assistant on Star Trek: The Next Generation).

Nicholas White, the other co-founder, was, until recently, VP of audience development for Sandusky Newspapers, a private company founded in 1822 that has newspaper and radio holdings in major markets across the U.S. and roots in Sandusky, Ohio. White says he recently moved to Austin, Texas to start The Daily Dot.

The details of what the site is going to actually do may be unclear, but one thing is for sure: Putting together Thomas — best known for his sharp-edged, gossip-style commentary about the Valley and some high-profile slap-fests with a few of its prominent citizens — with someone like Nova Spivack, whose ventures tend to be at the brainy end of the spectrum, should be an interesting mix.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• How Media Companies Can Compete Online
• Online publishers: Proceed to checkout

Lately, I’ve been exploring the idea of where the web will go next, and as a result, have been talking to many folks. Spivack has been in the web’s trenches for a very long time, and has always had a fairly unique view of the Internet. He and I started talking about the future of the Internet and how it relates to society in general. The conversation that followed centered on Spivack’s core argument that 21st century will be about the Now.

Spivack argued that prior to the 20th century, society was generally preoccupied with the past, studying history and reflecting on the past. In the 20th century, we became obsessed with the future, reflected in the furious pace of inventions and social obsession with science fiction through the decades. However, the 21st century so far is about the present.

The emergence of the real-time web is about the present, and the present impacts how we invent, Spivack argued. Over the next 10 years, we’re going to be looking for ways to deal with the near ubiquitous Internet connectivity  and data around us, almost in real-time.

“With the real-time web, the amount of information we have to handle is changing the Now,” he said. “Now is becoming a lot denser. There’s a lot more information in per unit of Now. The Now is getting shorter. The horizon is getting narrower. Now has gone from days to hours to seconds.”

In this new Now, the big challenge, especially for startups is attention. “Every new service competes for fraction of a fraction of our free time. Or displaces something else which has that time,” he said. But this challenge is also an opportunity. “It (attention) is the word that defines this phase of the web,” Spivack quipped. He had argued about the need for focusing attention in a guest post, Trailmeme and the Web of Intent. Somewhere, Steve Gillmor, the early proponent of attention economy, is smiling.

Spivack last year brought on Sanjay Reddy, who’d done corporate development at Gemstar-TV Guide and led its sale to Macrovision for $2.8 billion. Reddy knew from experience that TV watchers spend 10 percent of their time watching TV on the interactive programming guide (per set-top box data). The web has much more going on at any one time, but nothing like an IPG.

Does that metaphor carry over? That’s what Spivack, who’s serving as Live Matrix chairman, and Reddy, the CEO, want to find out. They plan to launch in May and gave me a look at the pre-release site under the condition that I not release screenshots. I’ll tell you a bit more about what they’re doing and describe in words what it looks like.

First of all, there’s the prototypical grid interface — though instead of listing channels due to preset numbers like on TV, they’re dynamically ordered based on demand. Log in during March Madness? That’s going to be on top. If a web metaphor is more your style, you can look at all the events in a Digg-like interface. Users can pull events into a personal playlist and receive reminders when they start. If you actually want to watch something, Live Matrix sends you to the host site rather than framing the content.

These ideas do need a bit more nuance — for instance, personalized ranking rather than global popularity will often be more helpful, and on days like the Obama inauguration there are going to be tens of duplicate or near-identical feeds running on various channels. Spivack and Reddy do say they’ll provide recommendations as well as social filtering based on what your friends are planning to watch. They’re also planning to provide widgets for syndication around the web.

I totally see the need for what they’re doing — in my time at NewTeeVee, we developed the “where to watch” franchise of posts after seeing the amount of people coming to our site trying to find the actual URLs for live video streams of major sporting and pop culture events.

The main way Live Matrix expects to list events is by partnering with content providers, plugging into publisher APIs and using a small editorial team. Then, it will sell advertising on programming based on demand expressed by its users. It will also maintain a page for every event after it’s over, pointing to archived video (which is excellent; so often people who do live completely forget about on-demand). And Spivack notes that pre-recorded videos released at a certain time will be considered “live” as well.

Live Matrix has a good problem but, like its on-demand cousin company Clicker, the web TV guide, it will need to aggressively build an audience for its site and through distribution partners, including hardware companies. The key is to make an interface that’s a significantly better option than searching for such events.

The company, dually based in San Francisco and Los Angeles with offshore development, has raised money from angel investors including Allen Morgan at Mayfield Fund.

Coding information in a standard way so that machines can see how one person relates to another, or how a string of words could alternately be a movie or a book title, is a challenge. But plenty of companies are taking little bits and pieces of the problem and solving them. One such startup, Radar Networks, the maker of Twine, today received $13 million in funding from Velocity Capital, Vulcan Capital and DFJ. Other startups such as EVRI and Freebase have also benefited from VC interest in the semantic web.

Some of the companies are following the standards offered by the W3C, which is pushing RDF as a standard data structure to underlie the semantic web. But not all companies working on helping machines figure out the relationships and categories that most humans have learned use that standard.

Nor are all the companies interested in making the semantic web work startups. Yahoo uses RDF in some of its offerings and Google‘s efforts with its social graph API initiative resembles the semantic web in its goals. Instead of using RDF, however, it’s using XFM and FOAF tags.

Reuters is another company that sees potential is getting machines to understand relationships. Earlier this month its CEO laid out a pretty compelling vision (at least to Tim O’Reilly) about how Reuters would rely less on delivering information and more on packaging its information in a way that could be used by analysts and computers to quickly delineate relationships.

Reuters would then be able to take its content, make it programmable and offer that data to users, who could then do with it what they will. Things like making relationship charts that currently can take a journalist and graphics department a couple of days to complete, and must then be monitored and changed manually, become easy.

The effort to render all of the data on the web into a semantic form will take a while. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, believes that semantic web applications are currently in the early adopter phase. Twine will unveil its efforts in March through a private beta and another startup, AdaptiveBlue launched a semantic plug-in called Blue Organizer earlier this month. Spivack believes that in 2010 mass adoption will take place as people start to expect machines to make “intelligent” connections between people and things.

All of this is interesting, but putting a layer of semantic code over the existing web raises some concerns. One is the danger of inaccurate or at the very least less nuanced sense of relationships between people. Another is the everlasting nature of information on the web. How will coded tags be able to follow the intricacies of human relationships as fights ensue, jobs shift and even names change?

Another issue that we’ll have to deal with is confusion as people try to figure out what the semantic web really is. I’m thinking of it as code added to existing and new web content that helps determine and maybe track relationships between people and contexts for objects. I’m not married to the W3C standards, however, and others are doing this without using those particular programming tools.

There are also plenty of other definitions and hopes for the next phase of the web that may play out before we get an intelligent Internet. It’s already apparent that the web will continue to become more useful over time, but won’t ever replace the benefits of human interactions. If you doubt me, just recall your most fulfilling customer service call with a person compared with your most fulfilling experience with an automated agent. While both are helpful, sometimes you need a real, live human being.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• Threats Loom Large for Microsoft’s Email and Collaboration Platforms
• The 2013 task management tools market

Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee uses the Social Graph meme to rebrand his semantic web efforts, writing in a blog post, “I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!” Berners-Lee thinks there could be big payoff in adding a layer of meaning atop the documents of the World Wide Web:

So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents.

But though Berners-Lee borrows social graph talk, he’s not really concerned with human relationships, but more about things that computers can understand, things like plane trips:

In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark.

The semantic web has always been about computers taking on more processing for us, not about computers allowing us to be more human, which is where the social graph might more naturally aim.

Semantic web fans would like to suggest otherwise. Nova Spivack, founder of semantic web startup Radar Networks, as well wants to make everything into a semantic graph story. “The social graph is a subset of the semantic graph,” he told me when we talked about the Twine launch.

But just like social intelligence is not a subset of academic intelligence, social knowledge and understanding isn’t a subset of the semantic meaning that semantic web technologies like RDF and SPARQL are aimed at representing. Computers can easily record and manipulate information about people taking plane trips — just like Raymond Babbitt’s autistic savant. They can’t as easily collapse social meaning into something useful online.

Though a unified social graph would be an unquestionable win for Internet microcelebrities who need to manage relationships with 2,000 or more relatively undifferentiated fans, most people socialize online with relatively few people in very complex ways, ways that are not necessarily well served by the wished-for unified social graph, ways that can’t be fully represented by computers.

So while the semantic web — the GGG — may represent people insofar as they take plane trips, that doesn’t mean it has the social intelligence to represent the social graph in a useful way.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market