So it seems that the two startups i talked today (metaweb and radar networks) are linked by a common past of some of the people involved
technorati tags:metaweb, radarnetwork, web3.0
Today I have seen from my subscriptions the rise of the attention to the soon-to-be-launched Freebase which is the first product that will be lanched by Danny Hillis’ Metaweb. I see a few point of contacts with RadarNetworks, another enterpirse that is getting hot in these days.
They both aim to give a new spark (and hopefully real life) to the term Semantic Web and
reading from the tea leaves of RSS it seems that this will be an interesting source of innovation in the coming months, perhaps a new battle field for the enterprises that are going to dominate a post-google internet (It won’t be easy nor fast though).
Going back to Freebase, while there is not much available at the moment, what seemes notable to me are the open job posts on Metaweb corporate site: I never seen an employer asking candidates to submit answers to a few questions together with the ususal resume and cover letter.
These are for the Data Understanding Engineer position (the one I find most interesting):
- What is your favorite time of day? Why?
- Mark V. Shaney is an ancient Usenet bot that generated realistic
(for some value of reality) prose that fooled many educated people
into thinking a human was the author. (See
http://groups.google.com/group/net.singles/msg/531b9a2ef72fe58 for
an example.) Describe succinctly an approach, algorithm, or
technique you would use to automatically distinguish Mark’s prose
from human prose, assuming you don’t have access to his compiled
program or source code.- What’s most broken with SQL as an API of database access? How would
you fix or replace it? What would a representation of your personal
music collection information in your new, improved design allow you
to do that you couldn’t easily do with a standard SQL database?
technorati tags:metaweb, semanticweb
the author Daniel Scocco arguments that bloggers certainly have an edge over job seekers that do not publish one and he says that it is so because the employee will have more informations on the candidate from his blog and his public presence than just from his resume or interviews.
Those informations will be even more true as they will probably not be mediated and influenced by the will to find a job (that sometimes makes people act a bit).
In the end hiring a blogger is a lower risk proposition because you have more
information and a better idea of how they are going to perform.
I find this idea can be applyed in most other settings where you would otherwise have to take a decision based on asymmetric knowledge that is when you may not have all the informations as the other part (as in many business transactions for instance). Using knowledge from the web (blogs and other social media) may mitigate the risk on both sides and thus may give an advantage to the more open actors over those enterprises that are more close to the outside: prospect clients will prefer doing business with someone from which they know what to expect rather than not!
Openness and partecipation to the social web should thus be considered a competitive advantage by the enterprises.