Dare Obasanjo is coming around to structured metadata: One thing that is clear to me is that personal publishing via RSS and the various forms of blogging have found a way to trample all the arguments against metadata in Cory Doctorow's Metacrap article from so many years ago. Once there is incentive for the metadata to be accurate and it is cheap to create there is no reason why some of the scenarios that were decried as utopian by Cory Doctorow in his article can't come to pass. So far only personal publishing has provided the value to end users to make both requirements (accurate & cheap to create) come true. The fact that those who are working with RSS are getting a sense of the value of metadata, especially aggregated metadata, is all upside. Despite what some people might still believe, there is a growing set of metadata out there where the burden of creating it is close to zero. Creation is a side effect of using a computer - the only interesting cost is bothering to deploy tools to collect it. There is other metadata again that is cheap to create, such as Movable Type categories, Wiki backlinks, or recently Technorati Tags. Start to mix and match this stuff with statistical techniques and you have the basis for powerful ways to organize information. When Google asks for more metadata, all bets are off. The Metacrap article has been given too much credence over the years. When you've been working with Wikis, semantic CSS hacks, or RSS, it's hard to ignore the benefits of metadata, so if that meme is fading, perhaps it's not a bad thing. Clearly not everyone requres a rigorous approach. If RDF or Topic Maps can come down to integrate with loose and fast approaches, things could get interesting....
Previous Topic
