I'm a planner. I like to plan. It's very comforting to know how things will happen. When I started this job I planned to spend a couple of weeks brainstorming, I outlined what I'd brainstorm about and what I'd have when I was done. The first week I pretty much stuck to my plan and investigated things, and then this week I was going to spend writing proposals about applications.
This weekend I helped my dad move, which involved flying 500 miles away and then driving his car back up on Saturday (and then helping him unpack on Sunday). The Saturday drive gave me a lot of time for thinking, and I realized that I was much less interested in what the applications would do than I was in how they would help the user visualize the complex data space. Metaweb is a great backend for things, and MQL is a good language for querying graph data, but there's still not a great metaphor out there for exploring that kind of data, and that's the puzzle I find most intriguing.
As it turns out, I'm going to end up with something along the lines of what I said I'd end up with, but the focus will be very different, because the piece I'm critically interested in is the presentation methodology, making the content domain much less problematic.
This afternoon/evening I'm heading up to the Metaweb offices to attend their Freebase user group with a couple of my co-workers who are flying up for the occasion. Should be a lot of fun :-)
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