technology

The Tagged Tanakh soft launch coincided with Tu B’Shvat at the end of January 2010. It was a quiet affair with not much pomp and circumstance. We released the site a tad prematurely, but we were so excited to get people tagging. We wanted to release early and release often.

In one year’s time, the Tagged Tanakh (TT) went from prototype to its first full release. Sure we couldn’t include all the cool features we originally wanted to, but we had made something unique – an online relational database of the English translation of the Jewish Bible.

The TT allows users to contribute remarks and tags to words and verses in the Bible. Vetted content provided by scholars and JPS staff is available alongside ideas and questions contributed by general users. People can create feeds that follow specific topics of interests or follow feeds made by other people. Feel free to take a tour!

We hope that it’s more than just hype, we want the Tagged Tanakh to be useful.

In recent news, Google and the U.S. State Department unveiled their plans to work with Iraq’s National Museum to digitize their collection and offer a “virtual tour” of Ancient Mesopotamia with Google tools. Comcast officially announced that they are acquiring 51% of NBC Universal. Stevie Wonder was appointed a position at the UN as a Messenger of Peace. And poor Tiger Woods is being skewered by the media.

So what do all these things have in common? Each one of these headlines forecast major developments in technology that will profoundly affect our future. Although I don’t have a crystal ball, I do have a healthy imagination and read lots of Warren Ellis comic books. So here are four things that I think will change the way we conduct our lives in the coming years.

In an earlier post I introduced the concept of datasets and how they are becoming more valuable via crowd sourcing tools. Tech guru Tim O’Reilly has suggested that, “Data is the next Intel Inside,” meaning that the next major commodity in our economy will be specific bodies of information or data. Here’s the money quote from the O’Reilly post:

“The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

Is the Information Age at an end? With a new decade nearly upon us, some have been saying that we are now entering the Network Age– a time when men will mine for data, not oil. Ranking and figuring out how people share their sentiments will become the driving force of community management and business growth.

In the book Authenticity, the authors describe “rendering experiences” for customers as the foundation of this new emerging economy. Digital Anthropology jobs and community management tools will drive the 21st-century economy. Eventually, we’ll all climb aboard the Cluetrain and ride off into brighter, more lucrative future.

It seems like everyone these days is talking about the future. Will people still read books? Can global catastrophe be averted by not eating meat?

According to the CEO of Google, in five years we’ll be surfing through mostly Chinese content online. According to a former muckity-muck at Facebook, the future is not information, but networks. While architectural students in London envision a future made up of, “car-crash spaces that occasionally come into focus as giant mechanised spindly crustacea.”

Yeah!!! An ideal organizational partner has just jumped on the map! Check out MediaMidrash an educational site that organizes online video content with Jewish educational curricula. They even have a section called Tanakh! Gee, I wonder whose version they plan on using…FYI Mechon Mamre is based off of the JPS 1917 public domain version.

Ours is much more au courant.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to receive an email requesting user testers for an online interactive Jewish educational platform. It’s like suddenly finding someone else who enjoys playing the same obscure video game. Compare our mission statements, they are strikingly similar. Ah zeitgeist!

I commend the folks behind the project for producing a succinct case for support and clear timeline. But there seems to be no mention of the technology under the hood. And for me, multimedia is more than just video, so where are the games, visualizations, and podcasts?

Just in time for the New Year! At long last, we can share with the world a taste of the Tagged Tanakh (TT) prototype!

The JPS Technical Advisory Board and our Tech Team developed the Tagged Tanakh prototype from January-June of 2009. Core functionality like viewing the English version of the Jewish Bible, adding and viewing tags and remarks, as well as basic moderation and content aggregation are now operational.