Michael Arrington highlights a new concept introduced by MetaWeb: Freebase. Think of it as Google Base on speed and for a definition of what Freebase promises, I'll quote TIm O'Reilly here too: "Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions." O'Reilly goes on to explain the real magic of what he sees here: "Now, the really powerful thing about this is that all these categories, these data types and the web of fields that define them, provide new hooks for applications that will be able to extract meaning from the data. That