Scott Blomquist

I really think Microsoft is onto something with their retro t-shirt line. The shirts evoke feelings from an era before you learned to hate Microsoft.

This post isn’t about one of those shirts. This post is about the current era. The one where many of you have decided to take sides with Justin Long. Well, I’m here to tell you that John Hodgman is my General.

Oh, I have to confess that I’m technically breaking the rules for a Monday t-shirt post—this isn’t a debut. I’ve been spotted wearing it before in the wild. Unfortunately, I missed the perfect opportunity to wear it for best comedic effect: it was in the laundry the day I went to Portland’s CyborgCamp.

Bonus link: next time I’m in Seattle, I’ll have to go stock up on Microsoft logowear!

Hey, everybody. I’ve been torn lately between tweaking my blog habits to provide more relevant content for my technical blog audience and tweaking it to provide less of the nuts and bolts technical content for my non-technical friends and family.

I ultimately decided that I have enough content in me to sustain both, but that I should separate it into two blogs. As I was considering what the right focus should be for my technical blog, I realized that one of the most common threads in all of my favorite technologies is that they have some platform component that makes it easy to take what they’ve done and build on top of it. (See below for the rundown of my favorite technologies—you’ll see what I mean.)

Once I internalized that platforms fascinate me, it didn’t take much reflection to realize they have very broad appeal—in large part they’re the stuff that makes mash-ups work, the stuff that enables people to do unexpected and amazing things with Twitter, and the stuff that makes the Internet tick. They’re essentially the legos that we techies build toys (and even businesses) out of as adults.

My intent for apiguy.com is for it to be a good place to watch for news of interest to my fellow platforms geeks, tips on how to build the ideal data platform onto your application or how to use existing data platforms to make your app better, and a space for me to share the recipes that I use to cook up some fun toys using some of the platforms that are out there in the world.

The folks at Metaweb have been some incredible progress lately on Acre applications that make it really easy to quickly contribute missing data (such as “is this a person or not?”, or “is this person male or female?”) to topics that Freebase is unsure of.

Here are the 3 that I currently know of:

• Typewriter – sort through lists pulled from wikipedia to determine if their topics are people or structures or locations or books, etc.
• Genderizer – sort through known people to determine their gender
• Beta, may be broken at any point in time: geographer – we know it’s a location, but where is it on the map? (I’ll update this once it’s out of beta and has a permanent URL like the other 2.)

I’m on the leaderboards on Typewriter and Genderizer at present. Come unseat me!

I was just thinking back to a time when I was in high school that I was excited that hard disk drive prices had finally dropped below $1 per megabyte, and 1 gigabyte disks had just been introduced. (Yeah—as in that 1 terrabyte monster you just built would have required 1000 separate drives and cost you $1 million dollars.)

Things have just kept on getting better and cheaper, and now, storage has gotten cheap enough that Google and Microsoft are both advertising email storage that grows faster than you do, and Yahoo’s gone all the way and is offering unlimited storage.

And it’s not just Yahoo that’s doing unlimited storage. And it’s not just storage that’s unlimited these days. The internet service provider that’s hosting this blog is currently offering a lifetime of unlimited storage and bandwidth for new customers. I had to try and fire several hosting companies (1&1 was my least favorite host of all time due to obnoxious fine print and really bad customer service) before I found Dreamhost, but Dreamhost has served me well now for several years.

They have good hosting and a good user community. Not to mention, they do free hosting for non-profits and are carbon neutral. Without having tried all of the web hosts out there, I’d say Dreamhost must be close to the best web host on the planet. If you’re looking for an Internet host (or even if you already have one but suspect you could do better), I’d highly recommend that you give them a shot. They even have a 97 day money back guarantee. (A trick I learned too late: if you think there’s ever a chance that you’ll have a need for SSL hosting, you can sign up using the promo code “1UNIQUE” to get a lifetime free unique IP for your site.)

Intro to Freebase

My evenings lately have been consumed exploring and tinkering with Metaweb’s Freebase. For those of you who have never heard of it, Freebase is a freely editable database that aspires to capture all of the world’s information in a structured, machine searchable format—sort of like Wikipedia, only for use by machines.

It has some serious potential, but as it currently stands, there a lot of work left to be done before it supplants IMDB and ancestry.com and MusicBrainz and every other collection of hyperlinked facts out there, but that’s what it’s trying to do.

You can already see it in action as an IMDB-style movie database or a genealogy browser (try out Moses or Noah or Queen Victoria), with more applications being developed against it every day. (In a future post, I’ll talk about Acre, their app development and hosting environment.)

My Freebase project

Let me show you an Acre app that I’ve spent the last couple of evenings building: Visual Search support for Freebase.

Visual Search is an extension to Amazon A9’s OpenSearch specification that enables the search box in your browser to show you images inline with query suggestions. The first browser to support it will be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8, but inevitably the rest of the major browsers will follow suit because the feature is just that gorgeous.

You can install the search extension by pointing your browser at my Acre application which will talk you through setting it up.

One interesting feature of Acre is that all apps that it hosts are required to be BSD-licensed, so you can browse my source and even clone and modify my application. Disappointingly, they have made no effort for Acre’s app editor to support Internet Explorer, which makes me wonder if they understand what it will take to break into the mainstream from the Silicon-Valley-developer-centric niche that they’re currently occupying.

A whole lot more where that came from

Like the title indicates, I’m pretty hooked on Freebase right now, and have been diving in deep on how it works and how to build stuff (both data and apps) on top of it. I’ve collected a whole bunch of knowledge that’s not really written down very well anywhere, and I’d like to start collecting it here. Let me know if you have specific things that you’d like to see covered.