Last week I spoke at OSCON Ignite, the evening entertainment bit of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and the Google Awards. Talks took the traditional Ignite format of five minutes, 20 slides. Slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, ready or not. Speakers were encouraged to address their personal brand of geekery….

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…