I imagine being able to run a search and get the results back on a beautiful timeline. Well now you can… here’s one that someone made earlier….

A Timeline of Zombie Movies

… This tool doesn’t quite work, for example, is a video uploaded to YouTube in 2008 about the Leeds United winning the FA Cup a current item or a dim and distant dream from the 70’s?  The results get very close to being something spectacular, and I could see how, with a bit of careful pruning you could author a great resource that was a mix of found material and user-time-synch’ed stuff.

I think this app makes use of the Freebase data cloud.

Take a look at the difference between a Wikipedia timeline on the Iraq War and a user-created version of the Iraq War and YouTube’s Iraq War…. Mmm… I’ve just tried to pull some of these sources/interpretations together into one IRAQ War timeline here, I’m not sure if it’s working properly, but being able to additionally see a timeline of events on a map is pretty close to stunning (even if it doesn’t quite work).

Following on from my rant on data…. here’s a quick example I made of using the Semantic Hacker API in Python. You can pass in a chunk of text or a URL and get back a list of categories that data should be in. Very very clever.

I’m weaving this in with other semantic toolsets and getting excited by the potential. You know Paul, “this could change everything”, and if not it might come a close second-best, which is to change something. It’s a start eh?
Now let’s all go win the million dollars before bedtime.