Things of Interest
The first is the article in ReadWriteWeb on Freebase (not to be confused with freebasing!), which could be a serious alternative to Wikipedia. To quote the source itself:
Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community—free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.
So far, it looks exactly like Wikipedia. However, unlike Wikipedia, which is a free form database, Freebase is structured, where concepts and relationships are interlinked into a gigantic network or graph. Another important difference is that Freebase is all about its API. Any information contained inside the database is accessible and can be retrieved via queries. In addition, the data in Freebase is under a Creative Commons license – meaning that is readily exportable and useful by others.
Also, Freebase just looks a look sleeker than Wikipedia. This means the UX is much better (IMHO), scoring big points from me.
The other thing to appear on my Google Reader was Darryl Burling’s announcement that the ASP.Net MVC framework has been released as a beta preview (well, technically this was from ScottGu, but I heard it from Darryl first).
What the hell is the ASP.Net MVC framework, I hear you ask? The site sums it up best:
ASP.NET MVC provides a framework that enables you to easily implement
the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for Web applications. This
pattern lets you separate applications into loosely coupled, pluggable
components for application design, processing logic, and display.
I’ll be looking into it much more closely over the coming weeks and who knows? Hopefully it’ll get a mention at TechEd this year.
