First of these was John Baeyens' talk on his soon-to-go-live social tips website "not so-so", of which you can find the current test version right here.
Basically, not so-so is kind of a mix between blogging and delicious in that you write up a short review, or tip on something (anything!) you like, which you then automatically share with the rest of the community. You can stay up to date with the tips that other people submit by following those people ala the delicious network feature. Extra features that are currently in the works are a calendar system and a rating system. The rating system in particular seems very interesting to me, as it could be tied to a recommendation system to put you in touch with people that share your interests, or just interesting tips from people not currently in your network. John's reply to the question "I want to see all events today within a radius of 20km from where I live" was along the lines of: "We have the data, we just need to implement it.".
The other cool talk was given by Will Moffat. It was a short introduction to Freebase which is basically a queryable service containing a structured version of the Wikipedia data. The database is queryable through JavaScript and returns a list of results using JSON, allowing for some interesting mash-up ideas. Better yet it's also possible to update the database using JavaScript. Currently freebase is still in alpha phase and registration is on an invite only basis. There are still some open questions though, mainly, how are the Freebase people going to deal with vandalism, as currently doesn't appear to be moderated. Also, will this project be able to gain enough interest as to gain a large enough userbase to actually fill out all the currently missing data.
Pictures by Bert Heymans, for more pictures, check out his flickr stream.
