Another historic milestone?

Friday, March 09, 2007 by Dave Winer.

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.