Neomeme

Update: See also my series on some of the cool “killer apps” for Freebase, which give a more hands-on demonstration:

The latest buzz on the Interwebs is Freebase. Tim O’Reilly gives a pretty good demo of the application, and the New York Times gives a decent overview for the layperson (complete with a picture of one of the founders in a stylish Creative Commons shirt). Personally, despite all of the criticism and fears that Freebase will create a super-intelligent AI that,lacking the imperfections of humanity, will destroy us all, I’m very excited about Freebase. It’s taking a huge step towards that ever-elusive semantic web. Basically, Freeweb is an attempt to tag and categorize all the world’s information. For years, technologists have tried in vain to create a semantic web for machines by using machines to organize information. Obviously, this failed miserably- our AI is just not up to the task. Freeweb takes the Mechanical Turk approach and taps into the power of people, the Internet community of millions to gather and organize its data.

To get people to willingly contribute to its databases, Metaweb(the company behind the project, and the project’s original name) brilliantly uses the keyword “free”. As any open source enthusiast will tell you, many people will jump at the chance to contribute to any project that is not only “free as in beer” but also “free as in speech” (that is, licenced under a free licence, like Metaweb’s Creative Commons Attribution License). By opening up its data, Metaweb allows all sorts of neat potential applications and mashups. You only need to look at the mashup cottage industry that has sprung up around Google Maps and expand that to all the world’s information to imagine the possibilities behind Metaweb. They’ve taken large strides towards building a critical mass of users by creating all of this buzz in the blogosphere, and, I personally can’t wait to see how Web 3.0, spearheaded by Freebase, takes shape.

Translation: Please, give me a Freebase invite, Metaweb. Pretty please? Thank you!