Freebase hackday

So on Saturday Metaweb organized a Freebase hackday, or fbhd09. The first thing to note here is that it began at the ungodly 10am :/, for me it meant i had to get up at 8:30.

Ok, so i managed to get there on time and my first touch was the high tech elevator, it requires the card to move up. I was expecting that a lot of people will be late, i'm glad i was wrong :). The first thing of course was to get a coffee, another positive surprise here, the coffee was actually good. Than i had a look at the freebase folks, i kinda remained disappointed. I mean i was in the worlds Web 3.0 leader (cyc being the possible exception), so i was expecting something ala this. As it turns out they are just people like you or me.

Than we were introduced to freebase and the event itself. As it turns out this wasn't meant to be a hackday, but rather an unconference (barcamp style). That means that there was a white board with empty spots and the attendees were supposed to fill it. There was also place for hacking, but from what i've seen it wasn't really used. The rules were very loose, for example Kirrily (from freebase) said "if you see two talks you want to attend conflicting change the schedule and make the conference be what you want it to be" :)

The sessions were pretty good, perhaps that is the reason why the hacking was much attended. I was present on several MQL sessions, data import stuff and Web 3.0 talk. Learned a lot of new stuff :). A great feature of being there is that you could walk to someone and ask a question (did i mention freebase folks where very nice?). One of my problems was "given this freebase id, how do i determine the interesting stuff about it?" and i got hints on how to do that. The idea is that you would pass a freebase id and it would be able to tell you a story about it.

I met an interesting guy who contributed significant amount of time to enter the philosophical stuff in freebase. Metaweb was nice enough to fly him here from Canada.

As a conclusion, it was well worth getting up at that ungodly hour, free coffee, free pizzas and lots of geeks, what is there not to like?