Better BBQ Through Chemistry — food is the perfect ground for geek training: there are measurements, there’s science, it’s easy to know whether you’ve succeeded, and you can eat all but the worst of your failures. (via BoingBoing)
NoSQL (East) — conference on East Coast for relationless databases.
Truly Social Data — Data will only be truly social when you can work with it in the kinds of ways we work with information in the real, non-computational, world. In the real world we don’t ask for permission to have an opinion on something, to add to the ball of information surrounding a concept. Our needs don’t have to be anticipated by programmers. We can share information as we please. For example, nobody owns the concept of Barcelona. If I want to essentially “tag” Barcelona as being hot, or noisy, or beautiful, I just do it. I can keep my opinion private, I can share it with certain others, I can hold conflicting opinions, I can organize things in multiple ways at the same time and give things many names.