Metaweb and Freebase

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):

1. What is your favorite time of day? Why?
2. 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.
3. 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

Partecipation as competitive advantage

In Are Blogs the New Resumes?

the author Daniel Scocco arguments that bloggers certainly have an edge over job seekers that do not publish one and he says that it is so because the employee will have more informations on the candidate from his blog and his public presence than just from his resume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.

technorati tags:business, blogs

Good help vs bad help

This post over at 37signals blog made me think about how designing a helpful help system should be very much one if the priorities for anyone developing a system whcih is to be used by anyone else [1]. In the comments i said:

What is lacking sometimes (most of the times?) is a good“help” design. I mean that “helping the users” should be integral tothe design of your application and be treated as a first-class elementas much as the rest.

For me a good help (or manual, or …) should have these:

1. be helpful (tell me how to do something, not the why of a feature, and don’t give me too options),
2. be contextual (help me on what I’m doing now),
3. educate (let me know me that i can do more, but don’t shout at me that I’m a newbie),
4. be self revealing (complex features of the systemshould not get into the way of the simplest uses, which I’ll need mostof the time, but they should appear evident to the advanced users)

[1] I think that it should be done even if you will be the only one to use it, but this is an edge case…

technorati tags:37signals, help, design

Rails Query Analyzer Plugin (now also on Oracle and Postgresql!)

A few days ago I discovered the query_analyzer plugin in a comment on the last article of The Rails Way series. It allows you to have the plans for the queries used in your application directly in the log file and this is invaluable when trying to to optimize the database for you shiny new rails application.

On the downside it was only for mysql and my oracle developer half though that it was what I needed, so here it is (with Postgresql support as well).

Use it but be warned that I don’t want to fork this plugin, so I haven’t prepared a proper svn access to it and I hope that my additions might be integrated by Bob Silva in his own codebase (I’ll post a comment in his blog since I can’t find any other way to contact him).

Download the modified plugin