Swarm Creativity Blog

Coolhunt Log #6 Monday, April 23, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Leading the Coolhunt today is Scott Cooper. SCOTT: Let's start with a website that I go to everyday: O'Reilly Radar at Radar.Oreilly.com. WEB: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/freebase_will_p_1.html SCOTT: I thought it would be interesting to discuss the software program Freebase. The concept behind it is quite amazing, and what it means for bridging ideas for the future of the web. Because it's an alpha product, however, we can't actually look at it at this point. PETER: On our 3/11/07 Swarm Creativity blog post, we discussed Freebase and Danny Hillis. Hillis created Thinking Machines, which involved a massively parallel computer called the Connection Machine. SCOTT: He's the brain behind Freebase, a s...

I stumbled into this NYT article about Danny Hillis – of Thinking Machines fame – latest startup, Metaweb Technologies. His goal is to create Freebase, a database that will describe things “how they are”. He wants, for example, to describe Arnold Schwarzenegger with different views as a bodybuilder, a movie actor, and a politician. I am wondering if the approach of having a centralized system to describe "things how they are" will ever work. The point is that the same things can have very different meanings for different people. I just think back to the only time I visited East Berlin before the wall came down. I went to a bookstore and looked at schoolbooks talking about the second world war. The books were telling how the great and wonderful Soviet Union liberated Germany from the Nazi dictatorship. The US was barely mentioned. In the meantime I have been in now unified Berlin many times. But I can not find these books anymore in the regular bookstores. The point is that ...