Hey, two things.
1) Do you have a Freebase tshirt yet? If not I'd love to send you one. Please let me know your size and postal address by email to kirrily@metaweb.com
2) I'm thinking of doing a data mob around the Influence domain, getting people to enter themselves and who they were influenced by, and then up the tree as far as they can manage. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.
Sounds good. My only suggestion would be to have people list their actual teachers/mentors or otherwise people that significantly influenced their life work, as opposed to "I really enjoyed reading Jane Doe in college, so I will list her as an influence." What do you think?
Yeah, I agree re: significant influences but I'm not sure I agree about actual teachers/mentors if by that you mean people you've met personally. Take a look at mine and let me know what you think. I've listed a small set of people who I've never met but who have significantly affected my thinking, the way I live, or my creative expression.
Good morning
I just noticed the data mob around the Influence domain initiative, and I find it problematic for application like the influence viewer I wrote.
If half of the person in the graph become "basically unknown" person who feel inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and alike then it will become quite pain browsing the graph in the search of historical figures and their influneces, since who want for example find me being influenced by Nagarjuna if the user is interested in the influences among Buddhist masters.
I would suggest to introduce some kind of flag attribute indicating which influence node was or is a historical or present figure with some level of publicity to be able to filter for this subgraph most people might be interested in.
The other maybe more clean idea which pops up in my mind would be to declare influence person to be a person who has gained some degree of publicity (or degree of more substantial influence or ...) either now or in the historical context and define influence as a relation between person in general (without having to be an influence node”
just me first ideas, curious what you think about this issue
cheers
martin
I agree that we do have to filter somehow, and hopefully in a way that is not too complicated. Maybe a 'notable person' attribute.
Ae you going to set something uncomplicated up Mike?
I think the best thing to do is roll back influences if they don't affect the creative work of the influencee. There is a creative aspect to all the influence in the graph...scientists, writers, musicians, artists, etc. I think influence is observed in the works created by the influencee. I think the checking of influences to make sure it's more than "I feel inspired by this historical figure" needs to be done by a community, similar to Wikipedia's high bar for "encyclopedic content".
