Wikia article in Technology Review

Read this article in Technology Review about how Wikia hopes to be the next search engine. It does a good job of giving a full view of what Wikia is trying to do, while keeping the language simple for most users to understand. The author points out that Wikia is a for profit hoping to ride the open source collaboration movement popularized by things like Linux and Wikipedia.
-Karl

Freebase Launches

I first saw this on a TechCrunch post, and they quoted Tim O'Reilly's article Freebase will prove addictive. (Read their posts to get more info) It is a step towards the semantic web, which in simple terms is a way of organizing the web so that your computer can find meaningful information pertaining to you and what you want. To get all the info you want together today would probably take searching in many different ways, but through the semantic web you would be able to ask your computer something like "find the closest store to my house that has batteries for my watch that is open on Sundays?" (see the wikipedia article for more detail).

I have not tried out the FreeBase service, but from what I see it seems like a step in the right direction. It will get a standardized way of looking at specific types of information such as companies, individuals and locations. It also takes into account how an individual and a location may interact. It has a long way to go, but very interesting development.

-Karl