Thinkbase doesn't necessarily answer those questions -- at least not directly, but it does allow people to visually explore the relationships that Freebase can expose. Thinkbase employs the Thinkmap visualization software to visually represent the semantic relationships between objects on Freebase as an interactive mind map. Each object on the map is represented by an icon that corresponds to the type of object it is. For example, person, place, movie, song, or artwork.

The site uses a two-pane display, putting the relationship map in the left pane, and the Freebase entry for the active node in the right pane. Every node on a Thinkbase map and be expanded to see concepts related to that object, or collapsed to clean the graph of relationships you're unconcerned with. Every map you create can also be linked to via a dynamic share URL.

Thinkbase is a really fun visual front end to the Freebase database that exposes the semantic relationships that such a database can reveal in a compelling way. Alex Iskold wrote last week that the problem with semantic search is that we're asking the wrong questions. Tools like Thinkbase can help us start to think about what type of questions we should be asking by clearly showing the type of semantic relationships that databases like Freebase excel at finding.

Below is a copy of the map Shuttleworth came up with (click on the image for a full sized version):

Shuttleworth's diagram is probably not an uncommon view of information flow for many readers of this blog. And it's still not done: the map has a large "to-do" section.

To begin creating the map, Shuttleworth broke his online information flow up into twelve categories, events, text content, videos, photos, microblog content, bookmarks, web sites viewed, software used, lifecasting, location, comments, and blogroll. He also has a similar tree for content that originates on a mobile phone. That's a heck of a lot of things pulling at Shuttleworth's attention, but I'm willing to bet that it's a familiar situation for many of us.

The growing importance of attention is something we've often written about on this blog (see Alex Iskold's excellent overview of the attention economy), and there are a number of different approaches to how to deal with it. In the social media space, one of the approaches that is currently gaining steam, especially in the area of social networking, is data portability.

Data portability will allow users to theoretically mashup and interact with all of their social media information from a single place. While that won't cut down the number of sites and services tugging at our attention, it does promise to make managing that attention vastly easier. Shuttleworth points to services like Profilactic and Plaxo Pulse that are already attempting to bring our online social lives under a single umbrella.

"Overall, it was very helpful to see an overview of how my online information flows. I managed to get rid of some redundant channels along the way and am in a good position to consolidate and make sensible decisions about how to share information from now on," writes Shuttleworth on his blog, saying that the map also demonstrated how complex our online lives are.

Shuttleworth released the map on his blog as a pdf, png (graphic), mmap, or xmmap xml file, for anyone wishing to explore it further or use it as a basis for creating their own online information flow chart.