Rough schedule today, hence the laziness

• Doing what I couldn’t with TotJot, and sounds just as nice - TotSpot. The company is presently in private beta, which is something we didn’t do at TotJot - our engineering arm built a solid, extensible platform and then we decided to go the PR consulting route (despite having PR experience on the team already). Bad move (along with overbuilding the backend infrastructure before having a real user base), but the concept is still bright, and I wish TotSpot all the best. Mashable is presently handing out some invites.
• What has eight letters, begins with an “F”, and may turn out to be a very useful web utility? No, not Facebook…Freebase. I tinkered with Freebase some time ago, and now Alex Isgold has an update on the open database platform.

And last but certainly not least…

• Democracy sans justice - A kindergarten teacher allows their students to vote an autistic classmate out of the room. Worse - it wasn’t done by secret ballot - the child was forced to stand in front of the classroom while this public humiliation took place. Even worse - the teacher admitted the case, yet has been placed in an “administrative position.” I wouldn’t let my dog within 50 miles of this teacher.

I’ve got 5 invitations for the Freebase alpha test, if anybody wants one. Use the contact form to send me your email address, and I’ll forward one to you.

UPDATE: …or just comment with a valid email address, like the last, smarter than I, person did. There are four three two one none left. Sorry.

UPDATE 2: I’m glad I didn’t get into a real review of Freebase - Kristen Nicole that better. I’ll will point out that now that I “know” some people on it as a result of the invitations, it makes getting around in there a bit more interesting anyway, as in seeing what people are up to. As far as I can tell, folks seem to be embracing the platform for building knowledge bases on very niche topics, similar I guess to what happens at Wikipedia.

I just started checking out Freebase under the “alpha” test. Feels like a personal profiler on AJAX steroids. Got a warning that I was using the wrong browser (Safari), but everything seemed to work fine for me. Neat movie and music database. I suspect it will get more interesting as users input more data. Will visit again - still, curious as to what others have thought…