It’s Friday afternoon here, and if you’re like me you get to a point during the afternoon where you realise it’s not really worth starting anything new. When you get to that point this afternoon, I recommend you come and spend a few minutes dinking around on Freebase.
This week’s data mob uses the Influence domain, one of the most popular with people who build apps and mashups on Freebase.
Most of the existing influence nodes are dead white guys like Karl Marx and Nicolaus Copernicus. What would it take to expand the Influence domain to include a much broader range of people, including more current/recent figures?
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to type yourself as an Influence Node. Then list the people who have significantly influenced you and, if you are so inclined, follow the links to those people and indicate who influenced them.
Please only include people who were significant influences on your life, not just someone whose books you read, or a favourite comedian.
When you’re done, add your name to the list of mobbed topics so we can take a look.
June 16th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Hi, I’m a little worried that this Data Mob might dilute the value of the Influence domain. It seems a little incongruous to read that Jules Verne influenced H.G. Wells, who influenced Carl Sagan, who influenced Peter from Metaweb.
The last fact is unlikely to be interesting to many users. (Nothing against Peter, it’s quite possible that he’ll be a figure of note in the 21st century.)
Perhaps the problem is one of definition, I assumed that “influence” meant “notable influence”, rather than “personal influence”.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:32 am
I did list myself in the Data Mob but for me it raised the same questions as Will has asked above. If I would access this influence data programmatically, how would I discriminate based on relative ‘celebrity’ or ‘notability’? Perhaps there could be a sort of Google PageRank style filter that one could invoke?
June 16th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I checked it with Mike Love, who instigated that domain — I see that Martin has also commented in that thread with similar thoughts.
If you look at apps like FreeInfluencer, you can see a measure of “importance” there. I also had some discussions about that with Colin from our data team. I guess my point is that it’s possible (and quite interesting) to algorithmically determine which influence nodes are “important” ones and which ones aren’t. Alas, algorithms like that aren’t my forté, but I’m sure someone will pipe up with some suggestions ;)