Silk - Publish collections of information - Blog

The bookmarklet: Add content to your Silk site while browsing

Mon, 06 May 2013 15:58:00 +0200

We launched a new feature for all Silk users today. It’s the Silk bookmarklet: a tool that lets you quickly add content to your Silk site.

A lot of users come across things they want to add to their Silk site while browsing. Doing so used to take a bit of going back and forth: you have to open another tab, add a page in your dashboard, and edit it. We thought there should be a better way to do this, which is why we created the Silk bookmarklet. The bookmarklet makes sure that a fresh Silk page is always within easy reach.

The Silk bookmarklet sits in the bookmarks bar of your browser. When you are browsing and see something you want to add to your Silk site, just click the bookmarklet. Doing so puts a screen with a fresh page of your Silk site on top of the web page. The source URL, images and selected text (if any) are already filled in. You can create bookmarklets for as many Silk sites and collections as you like.

We got a lot of use out of our bookmarklets while creating Silk sites like the 3D Printers database. Every time we saw a printer that wasn’t in the database, we just hit the bookmarklet for that site and made a page. It saved us a lot of time, and certainly made working on the site more enjoyable.

You can go to the ‘Bookmarklet’ section in your dashboard to install the bookmarklet. Be sure to check out the bookmarklet tutorial for a complete overview of what it can do.

Kickstart your Silk site with the new CSV importer

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:55:00 +0200

When you start a Silk site you can begin from scratch, but you might already have some data lying around. If this is the case, Silk makes your life a bit easier by offering the CSV Importer. This tool can automatically create a page for every row in a spreadsheet.

You can use this for your own spreadsheets or for publicly available datasets. The only caveat is that your spreadsheet must be exported as a CSV file. CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. It is the most common and easy way to format rows of data. Every well known spreadsheet program can export to this file format.

Today, we launched a thoroughly improved version of the CSV importer. It gives you a preview of how each imported page will look, and has many options to manipulate your data.

The importer has a dynamic preview: you can make changes by clicking the little pencils. For instance, you can remove a tag, or create a new Silk page from a tag. If you have URLs in your spreadsheet that point to an image, you can let Silk import that image. If you like, you can preview your changes on every page before you hit import.

We already took the spreadsheet importer on many test drives. It certainly made creating sites like Pirating the Oscars a lot easier! You can find the importer on your dashboard. For hands-on advice, check out the CSV tutorial on our website.

An introduction to the new Silk

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:32:17 +0200

We just did a little dance in the office! At last, we can officially announce the new Silk. This is a big release: almost everything involved in creating a Silk site has been improved. We introduced a brand new design, and made the startup time much faster. We think these improvements make Silk the best place to publish your collections.

There are countless collections of information on the internet: sites about restaurants, famous designers, software, and much more. Most are published on a blogging platform, or as static sites. This is a waste of value: they are hard to browse, and interaction with the content is limited. We built Silk so you can give your collections a better home. A Silk site has everything you would expect from a modern publishing platform, but also lets you browse and visualize your content in many ways.

Collections, fact sheets and widgets

To show you what’s new and how Silk works, let’s see how a Silk site gets made. Consider Dennis, a soccer fan who created a Silk site about the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. As a start, Dennis wants to add information about the stadiums that will host all those great matches. He can easily expand his site later.

To easily add structure to your site, Silk lets you create collections to group pages that belong together. For his World Cup site, Dennis named the first collection ‘Stadium’. He quickly added a page for every stadium in the new dashboard.

The new version of Silk introduces the fact sheet, a place for all the facts about the subject of your page. Facts are the magic sauce that allows Silk to understand the connections in your data and produce graphs, tables, maps, and other widgets. Dennis used the fact sheet of each stadium to enter their capacity and location. The rest of a Silk page can contain normal content like text and images.

It’s time to work a little Silk magic. On the homepage, Dennis inserted a map widget that shows where the stadiums are located. To add some more context, he also added a graph that lets you see the capacity of each stadium in a glance. Anyone visiting the site can hit the ‘explore’ button on each widget and play around with the data.

Dennis is planning to add collections for the individual players, match reports and participating teams, once that information comes available. The richer the information on the Silk site, the more interesting the options for the widgets get. When match results come in, Dennis can add goal statistics for teams and individual players, and show matches on each stadium page.

For now, Dennis is done. If you are signed in to Silk, you can click the follow button on Dennis’ 2014 World Cup site to get an email when he updates his Silk site.

Create your own Silk site today

Apart from making knowledge easy to organize, Silk lets you create any representation of it. After creating a collection of pages with facts, you and your visitors can explore your information to answer questions, or to find new connections.

We really think this new version makes sharing collections a lot easier. If you’re curious, please signup and create a Silk site, and you’ll be on your way in minutes. Your Silk site can be about anything: people made Silk sites about the solar system, things to do in Madrid, all the countries in the world, and much more. If you already have a Silk account, please head over to your dashboard to see your upgraded Silk sites. Be sure to check out the updated tutorials to see how to build a Silk site in more detail.

When you have used the new version, please let us know what you think. Of course, we will continue to push out new features. So keep an eye on our usual channels. We are looking forward to see your new Silk sites!

A new video tutorial and more examples

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:18:00 +0100

Lately we have seen more people create a Silk site to hold together the videos they have uploaded to Youtube. They create a page for each video and add reviews and other tags. This way they create a video database that’s easy to browse and can be extended with filtered tables or other visualizations. We like this usecase and want to encourage this further, so we made a new video tutorial that covers everything you need to make a Silk site with a video collection.

We also updated our example page with quite a few new sites:

The OCEAN project offers a fresh view on worldwide water design problems by combining datasources on water and population growth.
The Minecraft Silk site features data about the blocks, items and entities in the game.
The Oscars & Piracy site contains a detailed analysis of the piracy of Oscar nominated movies.
The Animation Legends site features information about legendary animators (mostly from Disney), and contains a host of resources for aspiring animators.

If you see more great Silk sites in the wild, we would love it if you could drop us a line!

Analyzing Oscar Piracy

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:34:00 +0100

It’s the same scenario every year: reviewers receive screeners of movies that are nominated for the Oscars, and somehow digital copies end up online. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) does everything in its power to prevent this from happening. Andy Baio makes an annual analysis of when the screeners leaked, which we think is excellent. Because Andy made his datasets freely available, we tried to add something to it.

We put the dataset in Silk, and combined it with data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). This makes the dataset richer, and makes it possible to analyze the data combined with genres, actors, etc. The result is now live on oscars.silkapp.com. We hope you like it!

What the Ghost Map teaches us about data today

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:28:13 +0100

One of our favorite stories to illustrate the power of information is chronicled in Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. The book is about a cholera outbreak in 1854 London and the impact it had on society, city life, medicine, and science in general. It reads like a medical thriller, and the historical account alone makes it worth picking up. But the true strength of the story is the insight it gives into the conditions needed for true multidisciplinary thinking.

John Snow and the 1854 cholera outbreak in London

19th century London smelled really, really bad. There was no working sanitation system, and people had cesspools underneath their houses. Physicians thought the foul air was responsible for spreading deceases, which made the government dump all the waste in the river Thames. This decision made matters worse. More cholera outbreaks occurred than ever before, killing hundreds of people at a time.

John Snow, a local doctor in London, was arguing for years that the evidence for the foul air theory was too slim, but nobody believed him. When Soho got struck with a terribly lethal outbreak on August 31 in 1854, he saw a chance to investigate it. Together with Reverend Whitehead, a man with strong community ties, he started to thoroughly question people in the Soho area. He asked them about the people they knew who got sick: where they drank their water, what they drank besides water, what they had to eat, and where they had died. The results from the interviews made clear that everyone who died during the outbreak drank from the water pump on Broad Street.

To strengthen his claim, John Snow made a spot map where he visualized the connection between the location of deaths and the location of the water pump.

This map represents a breakthrough in health geography, and can be regarded as the founding event of epidemiology. Snow’s methods were unusual in many aspects: maps were almost never used for anything else then navigation at the time, and the idea of collecting demographic information when it comes to epidemics was unusual. John Snow had the courage to collect and combine unusual kinds of information in unusual ways.

What have we gained since 1854?

Let us step back and look at the steps that were necessary to reach the important insights that ultimately saved many lives. First, Snow had crucial data about every death that occurred due to cholera. Then, Snow had the insight to visualize every incident on a map of London, which immediately showed that most incidents were clustered around a specific location. Finally, he combined the data on the map with information on the location of water sources around London. All these steps brought him closer to proof that the disease was indeed spread by specific sources of water, which could then be shut down immediately.

John Snow already had strong suspicions, but still needed to rule out that the outbreak didn’t have another source. He needed to play around with his data and visualize it to make a stronger case. Making it easier to work with collections of information is crucial for multidisciplinary thinking, and paves the way for unexpected discoveries.

At Silk, we are trying to create a better tool for working with different sources of data. If there ever were to be another John Snow, we want to make his life easier. To try Silk, go to our homepage and create a free account.

Introducing the Gallery

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:01:11 +0200

One of the most gratifying aspects of working on Silk is checking out the public Silk sites people create every day. We already started to tell the story behind a selection of sites, but we missed a place to show all the other great content people create with Silk. And that’s where our new gallery page comes in.

We will regularly add new Silk sites to the gallery. Please drop us a line if you know of a cool Silk site that should be on there.

New Tutorials

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:06:00 +0200

We put two brand new tutorials online: one that explains how to create a basic Silk site, and one about making a Silk site for your team.

The basic tutorial shows you how to make a simple, personal site in a snap. We illustrate the steps with examples from the real Silk site ‘A Tiny Guide to Madrid’.

We created the tutorial for teams because we are seeing a lot of team Silk sites popping up. We think a lot of you might want to create one too.

We hope this will help you to create all kinds of cool Silk sites! Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback regarding the tutorials.

Sneak peek of the new Silk

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 17:49:00 +0200

We are working hard on the new version of Silk, and we are sure that you are going to love it. Editing and presenting your structured content with Silk is going to be more intuitive and appealing.

We will tell a bit more soon! Keep an eye on our twitter account and this blog if you want to be kept in the loop.

Silk for personal projects: a smart tour guide to Madrid

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:25:00 +0200

Just a while ago, we opened up Silk to let everyone create websites that both humans and computers can understand. The feedback made us more than happy, and we are excited to see the very different ways people put Silk to work.

To give you a better idea of what’s possible with Silk, we decided to put some interesting Silk sites in the spotlight. We do this by telling stories about them. One of the first stories is about how Laszlito made a interactive travel guide to Madrid for his friend.

Our designer Laszlito is from Madrid, and a friend asked him to give him a tour of the city. Unfortunately Laszlito couldn’t make it, so he decided to put his favorite Madrilenian places in a Silk site. Doing this was simple: he created a page for each restaurant, bar, or sight he wanted his friend to see. Besides entering basic stuff like the address, he also wrote down all the little details only a local can know. For example, he wrote down a personal description of the place, whether you need to make a reservation on certain days, what the most delicious meal or cocktail is, and so forth.

What makes this tour guide so practical is that Silk lets you add structure to all these little facts. This way, you can list everything Laszlito wants to tell you, but filtered to match your current location and mood. When you’re in Madrid around Gran Via and feeling like a cocktail, you can use Laszlito’s guide and immediately see Museo Chicote is just a short walk nearby. If you want to eat in a vegetarian restaurant, you can list those in a snap. Of course, you can also casually browse the tour guide, just like you would browse the Lonely Planet. But your tour guide thinks with you when you need it.

You can head over to Laszlito’s story and read more, or visit the travel guide to Madrid directly. If you are inspired by Laszlito’s guide and want to make a Silk site yourself, register a Silk site, and head over to our new tutorial for building a basic Silk site. You’ll have your new site up and running in no-time!

Silk raises $1.6MM in a seed round led by NEA

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:42:00 +0200

Today we are very excited to announce the completion of a $1.6 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from existing Silk investor Atomico and three additional investors. The raised amount will be used to expand our team and to keep improving our product and infrastructure.

We are thrilled to partner up with NEA, the biggest US venture capital firm with a committed capital of $13 billion, who happened to announce their new $2.6 billion fund last week. Also, its a great confirmation that our existing investor Atomico (the fund co-founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrm) followed up on their investment from last year by participating in this round as well.

Additional backers in the round are Anil Hansjee, a well known angel and advisor to many companies, including Fon, who previously served as Google’s head of corporate development EMEA; Jens Christensen, best known for his role as CEO of Ellerdale (acquired by Flipboard); and Philippe Cases, an angel investor and entrepreneur, currently CEO of Spoke Software.

What are we working on?

For those who dont know us: Silk is a place to create, share and find structured information. Share those special places in Madrid, the video games you are playing or the length of your children as they grow. Public transport companies can use Silk to find patterns in their delays. Human rights organizations can keep track of violations by governments. Investors use Silk to publish their investment portfolio.

Weve learned that Silk comes in handy for information that:

has some structure,
is valuable to share in real time, but
should also remain available to be used later

Example

A current example would be a Silk site about Olympic medals. You may want to keep track of all Olympic medals as they are won, or perhaps filter on your country or on a sport you are interested in. The information should also remain available to generate overviews from, such as a map of the world indicating the number of medals each country has won or simply a list of medals won by The Netherlands.

We are very excited to be working with both Atomico and NEA, as this will help us to further build on our vision. If you are interested in using Silk, sign up here. Organizations who want to use Silk professionally, feel free to get in touch.

And finally, yes, we are hiring!

Today we open up Silk

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Today is a good day: we just launched the Silk editor. Everyone can now create their own Silk site.

Over the past few months Silk has been in private beta. Only the first 10,000 users could sign up and create a Silk site. It has been both exciting and insightful to see the first groups of users creating Silk sites. It teaches us what aspects of Silk are appreciated and where we can improve.

We have seen interest from professional publishers and data journalists, but also from businesses and personal users. During the private beta, we allowed users to use the Silk web editor to structure existing content and to build entirely new websites. Many users tried our importer tools to turn existing data sets into structured Silk sites. If you are curious by now, you may sign up here.

A structured web

If you have been following us, you know that Silk sites are websites that can be understood by both humans and computers. This enables an entirely new kind of web search and new powerful ways to visualize information.

The Silk sites that have been created so far demonstrate how Silk impacts the way information is consumed. For example, the Countries of the world site contains information about the various countries in the world, just like Wikipedia does. The site contains text like any other website, but allows you to interact with the content more deeply. It is like a database that anyone can use. Want to know which countries have a life expectancy below 60, for example? It is easy to get the answer in a table, chart or map.

Now that we have launched, more new Silk sites will be created each day. You can create your own site here. Making information available through Silk will make the web a better place, one Silk site at a time.

Introducing the Silk handbook

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0200

While Silk is an easy way to create powerful websites, it takes some understanding of the product to fully use all of the potential. To make this easier for you, we have worked hard on a Silk handbook.

Today, we are launching this brand new handbook. Obviously, the handbook is a Silk site itself.At this moment it contains 5 tutorials,63 glossary termsand 40 frequently asked questions. All of those numbers are likely to increase as we get more of your feedback and learn how to answer your questions better.

If you are learning about Silk, have a look at the handbook in general, or start with the getting started tutorial. Remember that you can always search for specific information using our search bar.

Importing existing data sets, and more

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0100

We’re not exactly sitting still in the Silk offices. It has been a month since our last update, though, so let me fill you in on what we have been working on. Read on to learn more about our new look and feel, the CSV importer, our improved sidebar and our new maps component.

1. A new look and feel

Slowly but steadily we are moving towards a new design for our product and for Silk in general. The new look and feel has been applied to all sites. Have a look at the Solar System, for example, and let us know what you think!

2. Import existing data sets

Have a CSV file with data you’re eager to get into Silk? Great, we now have a simple import tool for this. The CSV importer takes your CSV file and turns each row into a Silk page. Read more about how to use the CSV importer.

3. Return of the sidebar magic

As you’re tagging your content, you’ll see these tags appear in the magic bar on the right. We now show some additional contextual information. Whenever we think something is a location, we’ll display a little map. Currencies will be converted and numbers compared to the same tags on other pages. We’ll be further improving this over time, so start playing with it and let us know how it works out for you.

4. Numeric data on a map

The Silk maps component allows you to display pages on a map. It displays a pin for each page it has a location for. We’ve updated the component, so that it can display an extra (numeric) property. For example, the map below shows all elementary schools in the Dutch city Maastricht. The size and color of the dot represent the number of students.

Get on board

If you are really curious and would like to know all the little details of what we did, check out the release notes. If you don’t have a Silk site yet and are interested in getting one, sign up for our beta list. We’re inviting users continuously these days and would love to get you on board.

Spread your wings: set your Silk site free

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Some of you already have early access to Silk. We are excited to see the first Silk sites being created and we are working hard to make Silk even better. I am happy to tell you about some of our recent improvements.

1. Make your site public

Show your hard work to the world by making your site public. Under your personal menu, go to ‘browse your sites’, click ‘manage’, and change private to public. Now everyone can view your site. Easy as that.

2. Collaborate with others

It is now easy to invite additional editors to your public or private Silk site. If you’d like to keep your Site private, but would like share it with some people, you can invite them as a viewer. This can be found under ‘manage your site’ as well.

3. Image drag and drop

Not everyone knows that Silk supports dragging and dropping images. Just drag any image file from yourcomputer and drop it into a Silk page you are editing to add some visual beauty to your site.

4. Help videos

We added some help videos to make it easier to start using Silk. The videos cannot be seen by your site visitors, so they won’t be distracted. We will keep adding new videos, so please let us know what’s unclear to you.

What’s coming?

We are dedicated to learning from our early users and are working around the clock to make Silk prettier and easier to use. We are very happy that Laszlito Kovacs joined the team this month as a fulltime designer and that Jeffry van der Goot joined as an interaction engineer. Lots of good things coming. Stay tuned!

Launch of the first public Silk site: The Next Web Index

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:42:00 +0200

Today the first publicly available Silk site has launched: The Next Web Index!

The Next Web Index is a technology companies database that runs on the Silk platform. The content has been created by The Next Web and is partially based on data from Wikipedia and TechCrunchs CrunchBase. It contains profiles for over 73,000 companies, 88,000 persons and 6,000 related organizations. Think companies like Groupon, Netflix and Tumblr, persons such as Steve Ballmer, Elon Musk and Jerry Yang, related organizations such as Atomico and Y Combinator, and products such as Google TV.

The Next Web Index is a powerful resource for finding information about technology companies. Silks added value becomes particularly clear as you enter explore mode, which lets you search, sort and view the information in a breeze. Use the controls on the left to find the information you’re looking for. Generate sophisticated overviews such as CEOs under 30 who have raised over $1 Million in early funding rounds.

The Index is still work in progress. The editors from The Next Web are updating the content continuously, but as of today its out there to be enjoyed by everyone. The pages contain feedback links and all contributions are greatly appreciated by the TNW team.

This is a great day for us here at Silk. Finally everyone can see what we’ve been working on the past two years. The next step is the launch of the Silk editor, which lets everyone create Silk sites like The Next Web Index.

If you didn’t request an invite yet, make sure to request it on our homepage.

Silk completes €320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico

Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

Investment will bring groundbreaking technology and product to market

Amsterdam, The Netherlands May 18, 2011

Silk, the Amsterdam-based web startup, today announced that it has completed a 320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm led by Niklas Zennstrm, who also co-founded Skype.

Other investors participating in the round are Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, Han de Groot, founder of MetrixLab, Hans-Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten and Mark de Lange, who is Founding Partner of Global Grid Capital.

Silk is a web-based tool that allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. The tool enables users to choose the data they want from the mass of information available and to view and arrange it in ways that make sense to them.

It is at the forefront of the Web 3.0 trend that helps users interact with the huge and growing volume of information online. A video explanation of the product is available at http://www.silkapp.com/.

Silk last month won the Best overall startup award at The Next Web Conference, a leading European technology conference, in Amsterdam. It is in private beta at the moment, but people can request invites to get early access to the product at the companies website.

The new funds will be used to bring the product and technology to market and scale up development efforts.

Salar al Khafaji, CEO and co-founder of Silk, said: Silk allows content creators to present information to audiences in a more engaging way, and allows users to sort through information and visualize results in compelling ways.

For example, publishers can use it to enhance the value of their content, and the service they offer to audiences, and we are already working with several publishers to create Silk powered web sites. We also have plans for other uses of the product.

Geoffrey Prentice, Partner at Atomico, said: We are delighted to have led this investment round. It highlights the huge potential that Silk has, and our enthusiasm for working with talented co-investors. The caliber of people participating in this deal reflects the companies outstanding products and management team.

Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, said: Im very impressed with the vision of the Silk team who have developed a powerful technology that is bound to revolutionize the space of content creation and search.

Mark de Lange, an investor who is Founding Partner at Global Grid Capital, said: As the amount of online content and data grows exponentially, and will continue to do so, publishers and consumers alike will need tools that enable them to derive real value from the available data. I believe Silk is uniquely positioned to be one of these tools.

Silks technology has been in development since 2009 and the company started rolling out its beta platform this year in co-operation with The Next Web, one of the largest tech blogs in the world, and NRC, a leading Dutch newspaper, who were early users.

To stay up-to-date on Silk, please visit www.silkapp.com and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/silkapp.