July 20th, 2010

This internet fad

I was once posed an interesting question, “Do you think this internet thing is a fad?”. At the time you’d not sound crazy by replying with a yes. However as time went on and retrospect began to creep up on us all the answer eventually became a firm and resounding no. So as the internet has developed it has gathered more information than it knows what to do with and the worst thing about this is most of it is unstructured data that has no way of relating back to another piece of relevant data. Google has made and continues to make huge steps in making sense of this data but what we really need is another way of preparing and distributing data. This is something that will become more and more important as we all continue to flood the facetubes with superfluous information. Now this is where Metaweb, Google’s latest acquisition, comes in.

Metaweb is company that, like Google, has been trying to catalogue the worlds data and been doing a pretty good job of it since 2005. The main tool in Metaweb’s arsenal is Freebase (no, not the chemical kind). Freebase can be best explained by its famous quote as being an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”. What Freebase and Metaweb have done is create a common framework for everyone to structure their data, from content writers to web developers, so that it can be used and re-used ad infinitum. The power of this idea is not new to database administrators but bringing it’s power to the average person is where the real magic begins. This video should help illustrate…

So, other than being a database developers wet dream, it will create a structure to user generated content that hasn’t been easily available until now.

Also, i’ve been watching a new show called Louie. It’s a bit funny.

That is all.