What's Joel uo to?

Hello Good Baad subscribers, apologies for the lack of action on this blog. As before I am still working on the site and working out how to improve value and usability. One step I've taken is to separate any developer and personal information about me (Joel Hughes) onto my personal blog.

So, if you're interested in learning about how web apps are built using PHP, Ruby, Python and Erlang (plus other useful development info) or just want to check out what I'm up to: head over to Joel Hughes's Blog.

The rest of you, stay tuned, Good Baad will be improving soon.

Extreemes of opinion make the best spark for debate

A quick link to an article on Signal Vs Noise, I think this quote applies to Good Baad perfectly (or at least what I'm trying to achieve with the site).

As a political pollster, I always observed that the poll that often got the most coverage was the one that was different from the others, regardless of whether it was right, or whether the pollster had any track record. This is true with opinions, too: those on the extreme right or left, or those that are the most titillating, seem to drive the most traffic through their sites. The center doesn’t seem to have either the edge or the passion to grab the same kind of traffic.

Mark Penn, former advisor to the Clintons and Tony Blair

I better get going with this blog and podcast!

Freebase is massive!

I'm still only writing sporadically, but thought that this post on the Freebase Blog was worth a look.  Basically Freebase now has over 5 million topics! That is a huge amount of information, and the relationships between them all are becoming more interesting at an astonishing rate.

All good news for Good Baad as we piggy-back on this data.

Publicity, again

I'll be working out what to do with this blog very soon (quite possibly a pod-cast!), in the mean time please vote GoodBaad up on Single Function.

New functionality

I've enabled a new piece of functionality that I've been holding back (just to keep things uncluttered) - you can now view how topics relate to each other based on their freebase tags (categories to those of you unfamiliar with tagging, these appear below the title on each topic's page).

This should open up the data a little more and allow users to populate under represented areas. For example football teams (both American Football and "soccer") are fairly well represented, but Formula 1 teams are not. Perhaps F1 fans might like to get this area padded out to make it more accurate.

It should also make topic discovery more natural. After voting for Guns 'n' Roses you may click the link for other bands based in L.A.

Finally to aid those researching a particular area you can view a list of all available tags.

I hope you like the new addition!