It’s just over a week til Hack Day and we’re counting down the days. You can still register but remember, spaces are limited, and we expect them to fill up before the day. (Last time round, we had to cap attendance to avoid over-crowding.)

We have a lot planned for Hack Day! For instance:

Releases

Our product team are working like mad to get a bunch of developer tools updated and released for Hack Day. They include:

• Acre version 1.0 and an updated developer hub and app directory.
• Freebase Suggest 2.0 — an improved version of our Freebase-powered suggest/autocomplete jQuery widget
• Mjt 0.9 — I hear rumours that there’s a major update to Mjt in the wings
• freebase-python — significant updates to our library for Python developers to talk to Freebase

Experimental

We have a few experimental projects we’ll be presenting, too.

One is MQL Extensions, which allow you to extend MQL to mash up against other services. We demoed this at the Palo Alto Semantic Web gathering a while back, showing a mashup between Freebase, Twitter, and last.fm done entirely within a MQL query.

The next is our improved reconciliation service and (highly experimental) spreadsheet loader. Though this won’t be ready for general use by Hack Day, we are hoping to be able to demo it.

Unconference talks

Our unconference format means that anyone and everyone is welcome to grab a room, a whiteboard, and a projector and talk about any Freebase-related subject that interests them. Last year we had talks on everything from schema for music and recordings, to geodata, to using the Freebase data dumps.

If you’ve got a subject you’d like to talk about, this will be a great chance. Some of the talks I’ve heard mentioned in advance include:

• MQL Boot Camp — a crash course in querying Freebase’s structured data
• How Will helped the Wall Street Journal embed Freebase data on their movie reviews pages
• Data games: how to make contributing to Freebase easy and fun
• Freebase and the Semantic Web: linked open data, Common Tag, and more.

Projects

Last year, we found a lot of people were interested in hacking on/with Freebase but didn’t have any particular project in mind. This year, we’re providing a little more structure. Brian Karlak is helping to organise projects in advance. He writes:

Do you have something you’ve been itching to see implemented in Freebase? Perhaps it’s an Acre app that shows off your favorite domain in an entirely new light, or a semantic mashup that opens up a world of new possibilities. Maybe you have a cool data set that you’ve been waiting to load. There are all sorts of possibilities — Games With A Purpose, Social Apps — you name it!

If you have a project that you’d like to work on, please let us know about it! Go over to the 2009 Hack Day Project Base and enter a brief description of your idea, along with a rough breakdown of what needs to be done to bring it to fruition. We’ll help you get prepped up beforehand, and on Freebase Hack Day, we’ll give you an opportunity to pitch your idea to the attendees and find people to help you hack on it.

BTW, the best projects are ones that:

1) have a clear short-term goal (eg working prototype, data load) that has a reasonable chance of being completed in a day
2) require a cross section of skills (data wizard, l33t c0ding skillz in Python or JavaScript, web artiste, etc)
3) have clear places where 2-3 people could help out

So, if you have an idea — let us know about it! To help us make sure that you have everything you need, we’re asking that you send in your submissions by Tuesday, 7/7.

Tell your friends

Please help us spread the word about Hack Day. If you know a venue where we should publicise it, let us know! You can also blog about it, tweet, or just drop an email to any friends or colleagues you think might be interested.