Scripting News: Another historic milestone?

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Another historic milestone?

You'd think after Tim O'Reilly over-hyped Yahoo Pipes he might tone down expectations a bit on the latest half-baked idea to roll through the tech blogosphere. But not this time. Here comes another historic milestone in the history of the Internet, Freebase.

But wait a minute, where's the beef?

It sounds like a flat-file database that's open to the public. Not clear if there are rules about who can edit what, how they insure quality. Who does the reverts? How do they keep the spam out? Trolls?

And while they say there's an API there doesn't seem to be any information about what the API does and who can use it on what terms. So it's hard to judge how much an innovation this is for the Internet and how much it is a way to capture UGC in a VC-owned data silo.

Mike Arrington likes it too. Why exactly will Google people be slapping their foreheads saying they could have (or should have) done this. It seems like a secret rehash of GoogleBase, which hasn't exactly been revolutionary.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:33 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Feb Apr