Quick updates: Wedding, Hack Day, Books

June 26 2009

I’m about to head off to my wedding in Mexico! I’m afraid while I’m gone I won’t be checking email very much, so please don’t be sad if I don’t write back to you immediately, I’ll try to get through everything when I get back! If you like my posts on… read more

Why Semantics?

June 02 2009

In February I gave a tutorial and a talk at the most awesome conference ever (go Tash!) called Webstock, in Wellington, New Zealand. The talk was called Why Semantics, and was essentially about the ideas behind the semantic web and why they’re interesting to normal working developers. After I gave… read more

My latest project: Freerisk

April 17 2009

For the past few months, between writing books and my day job, I’ve been working on a project with my friend Jesper called Freerisk. A few months ago after we first heard Tim O’Reilly’s “Work on stuff that matters” speech, we started talking about what issues, besides the environmental concerns mentioned… read more

A crazy few months

March 02 2009

Apologies for the lack of recent posts (I think you’ll forgive me in just a moment). I’ve had a crazy few months, but here’s what I’ve been up to, with links for stuff you to pre-order and download!. Finished the draft of my second book, with my coworkers Jamie Taylor… read more

Freebase hack day!

October 22 2008

My employer, Metaweb, is hosting Freebase Hack Day on November 8th, 2008. It’s free and there will be lunch and T-shirts provided. If you’ve been curious about developing on with Freebase or if even if you’re not a programmer and are interested in open-data, then it should be a great… read more

Personal data integration (part 1)

October 14 2008

I’ve been toying with the idea of attempting “semantic integration” of a lot of personal data in my life. I’ll be sure to share more later, but so far I’ve managed to pull together my September phone records, my email history, my contacts, my calendar and my Facebook friends (via… read more

Test post from Blogo for preview

October 13 2008

This is a test post sent by Blogo in order to generate a preview template. It should be deleted shortly. read more

Web 2.0 NYC, Freebase UG meeting, and Taleb

September 16 2008

A few quick updates: I’ll be speaking at Web 2.0 in New York City this Thursday at 3pm. If you’re at the conference, find me and say hi! While I’m gone, Freebase is having a user group meeting. Here is the info. Great speakers, you’ll seriously love the GeoSearch API A new… read more

O’Reilly interview at OSCON

August 31 2008

While I was at OSCON earlier this year, I did a 20 minute video interview with O’Reilly. I think the idea is to take a lot of interviews and edit them down to shorter segments for some kind of video supplement, but they’ve also posted the entire thing on Youtube.… read more

A San Francisco Restaurant Health-map (with code)

August 16 2008

If you’re just interested in a heat-map of restaurant sketchiness in San Francisco, here it is! If you want to learn about how it was done, keep reading below. Click to see the interactive map (In addition to showing the “sketchy areas”, it also is great just for seeing where the… read more

The “excluded middle” of technical books

August 16 2008

(ok, I know that “excluded middle” has a specific meaning in philosophy and I’m using it incorrectly here, but I like the way it sounds) A couple of months ago I read a book called A Semantic Web Primer, published by the MIT Press. It was recommended to me by my… read more

Snoozemail

July 21 2008

The other day my friend Jeff asked me if there was a way to “delay” email. We looked around for a service that would let us do this, but couldn’t really find anything. So I threw together snoozemail… it’s a couple of Python scripts and a cronjob, nothing fancy, but… read more

Yes, I’m on Twitter

July 17 2008

A couple of people have asked me if I use Twitter. For those interested, you can find me here. If you find it interesting, my updates are public, so you can follow me. I can also be found on Friendfeed and Flickr. If you’re sick of the proliferation of social media, feel free… read more

Upcoming talks

July 17 2008

I have a few talks coming up, if you’re planning to attend any of these events, be sure to drop me a line! OSCON 2008: Data-mining Wikipedia and other semantically weak sources Web 2.0 Expo New York: The ecosystem of business and social data Web 2.0 Tokyo: Haven’t decided on a topic… read more

Freebase User Group Meeting

June 16 2008

I’ll be speaking at the Freebase User Group Meeting tomorrow evening, on the subject of “Business data in Freebase”. I’ll be showing how I’ve used data about public companies from the government and various other sources to populate Freebase and build cool interactive visualizations. It’s being held at the Metaweb offices… read more