Freebase
Lots of buzz recently about Metaweb‘s product Freebase. My friend Kevin directed me to a good essay by Esther Dyson on Huffington Post that attempts to explain how Freebase will try to fill the space between the world of the fluid Wikpedia entry and that of the rigid Oracle database. While the goal of Freebase is clear (to organize information in a functional manner such that computers rather than humans) the path they will take to get there is far less apparent. Also, as I have written before, in order for information to be organized and interpreted by computers, the information has to be online in the first place… 
