Apr 22 2008

Llibreria bookstore, Amsterdam

Erica Firment

Apr 17 2008

An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

Erica Firment

This is an excellent study of the many aspects of cats. I, for one, regularly check my cat’s depth, as it often changes depending on the shedding season, and sometimes I loose my cellphone in the fur.


Apr 16 2008

Shh. “The Library” is the subject of the Freebase Data Mob

Erica Firment

I’m a librarian by ethnicity, if not profession these days, and there’s nothing I like better than free information. Free as in beer and free as in speech. Which is why I like Freebase.

Freebase is a free database. Of data. On everything.

Everything in Freebase is publicly available, including the relationships between topics. The information is culled from a variety of open sources, and includes things like, say US zip codes and Walmart Store locations.  Every week their community manager (who happens to be my flatmate and a fellow Victorian Housekeeping Aficionado) picks a topic for a “data mob”, and the community adds information to Freebase on that topic.

This week it’s libraries. So, Librarian Avengers, I encourage you to go in and add stuff. I suspect you know a bit on the subject.

Who knows? Maybe one of you will make a video showing the correlation between library locations and Something Really Good…

*Edit* You gotta have an account first. Just so you know.