I stopped watching the webcast (see part 2) about two hours in.  While WolframAlpha may go down over the weekend, it is up now for experimenting.  In part 1, I worried about my first impression:

What is interesting to me is that it gives you the answer, but not the source. For calculations, there isn’t really a source anyway. I don’t cite that 2+2=4. However, I do cite the population of Germany. So how are we supposed to know it is right? On the other hand, I think showing similar information you might not have asked for is cool.

Turns out this isn’t a big thing to worry about.  WolframAlpha gives you the source of it’s answer.  For example, I searched for swine flu.  It told me the scientific name along with the number of cases and deaths over the last couple of days.  In addition to a nice pop-up and PDF to export the data, it has a “source information” link at the bottom.  This shows the data set used to derive the answer along with other resources one might be interested in.

As a source for learning, I think this is pretty cool!

The process of bringing Wolfram Alpha online is being webcast live right now.  It starts with a 5 minute intro along with some other pre-recorded clips.  Some interesting tidbits:

• it will be run on thousands of CPUs
• it is planned to be a 48 process – presumably shooting for being fully live Monday morning
• the webcast will include deployment and testing

I look forward to seeing snippets of it throughout the weekend.

I also watched the overview of what Wolfram Alpha is all about.  My first impression as posted earlier on JavaRanch:

What is interesting to me is that it gives you the answer, but not the source. For calculations, there isn’t really a source anyway. I don’t cite that 2+2=4. However, I do cite the population of Germany. So how are we supposed to know it is right? On the other hand, I think showing similar information you might not have asked for is cool.

I expect my impression will change once I actually get to try it out.

7:15 CST , I’m still unable to get through to the live part.  Firefox is still showing the pre-recorded clips and my other browser is timing out on the site.  Will try agin later.

7:30 CST: It was a browser caching thing.  Clearing the cache shows justin.tv – the live part.  The site is very slow.  I think demand is higher than expected to follow the events live.  Maybe it was publicized too well?

7:31 CST: It’s up now.  Reloading yet again helped.

See part 2 for my impressions of the parts of the webcast I am watching tonight.