I went to the 16th Annual EFF Pioneer Awards tonight. The opening entertainment was a debate between Fred von Lohmann and Mark Cuban over the merits of Youtube and the DMCA. It was a high spirited and good natured fight over the companies "cowering behind the DMCA" (Cuban) versus the convenience to copyright holders of being able to take down offending content without court action (von Lohmann).
Afterwards, the EFF presented awards to Bruce Schneier, Yochai Benkler, and Cory Doctorow. Yochai Benkler was unable to attend, but sent a prerecorded acceptance speech. Bruce Schneier was "introduced" via the presentation of some Bruce Schneier facts before coming on stage. Cory Doctorow was presented with goggles and a red cape (thanks to this comic) before giving a particularly moving acceptance speech (and an engagement announcement, too!)
(full photoset here)
OQO announced today that the OQO 02 is now shipping. I had a chance to try one of the pre-production machines at their office in San Francisco, and I was impressed by the design.
Martin Heller has written a thoughtful technical review of Freebase and the Metaweb Query API in an article titled Freebase, the Semantic Web, and the Metaweb Query API on the Strategic Developer weblog at Infoworld. I recommend that any developer interested in the Metaweb read his review. And if you're really interested, I have three invitations to give away for our alpha test.
At Metaweb, we're making our API as open as possible - here's the documentation. The API allows programmers and web developers to query Freebase via MQL (mickle) the Metaweb Query Language. MQL is not your standard SQL "select user_name from users where ..." syntax because our database allows for a great deal of expressiveness and connections between objects with varying schemas.
If you want to ask questions and learn more, our dev team posts on the Freebase Dev Blog. For executive-level discussions about Freebase and the philosophy behind it, see Robert Cook's blog, Freebasics.
In addition to the API and MQL, we've also open-sourced (BSD dual-clause license) a web toolkit called MJT (midget). MJT is influenced by Kid and Genshi, and allows developers to query and display information with the rendering done in-browser. It's a nice way to create data-driven applications without a separate app server. Javascript has come a long way.
Here's a MJT documentation excerpt.
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MJT Templates
Mjt is an HTML templating engine that runs entirely in a web browser. It was built for the Freebase service, but it can be used for many other web services. It is distributed as open source.
Mjt makes it very simple to take data from a web service and format it in a browser, with no server support. The templates are hosted and delivered as static HTML, and they are compiled and applied entirely in Javascript.
Mjt is particularly useful with services that return JSON values and accept a callback= parameter, such as the Freebase service and the Yahoo JSON API. With these services you can use mjt to build "mash-ups" that incorporate data from services on multiple hosts.For a step-by-step introduction to the mjt template language as well as an example of mjt in action, see the intro tour.The U.S. House Judiciary Committee is in the process of putting 3000 pages of scanned emails on-line. These are emails the US Department of Justice handed over in relation to the firing of eight Attorneys General. The documents are linked to from the front page, in the "What's New" section.
Here are direct links to what's on-line at the moment. The printed emails are still being scanned, so check the Justice Department page for more. And remember, if you find something interesting, you'll be doing everyone a favor by posting it.
There's one week left to snag an invitation to Metaweb's Freebase alpha test. I've got three invitations to give away. So if you're interested, post a comment here.
(full disclosure: I work for Metaweb)
I just got back from SXSW, and there was a really positive response to Freebase from the people I met.
I think that our decision to make Freebase data available via the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-by) license is a big part of the positive reaction -- people are willing to share when they know that the sharing goes both ways.
Freebase invite contest
Now I'm looking for people who have data to share and would like to try out Freebase. So I'm holding a contest - if you want to use Freebase, post a comment and tell me why you are interested. The three best submissions between now and Friday, March 23 will get invites to our alpha test.
Whether you're a regular user, a programmer who wants to use an API, or have an interesting data set that you'd like to share with the world, you've got a chance.
