Monday, January 24, 2005

Removing the Crap from Metacrap

Folksonomies, Taxonomies and Metacrap "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.

Postscript: Coincidentally I just noticed a post entitled Meet the new tag soup by Phil Ringnalda pointing out that emphasizing end-user value is needed to woo people to create accurate metadata in the case of using semantic markup in HTML. So far most of the arguments I've seen for semantic markup [or even XHTML for that matter] have been academic. It would be interesting to see what actual value to end users is possible with semantic markup or whether it really has been pointless geekery as I've suspected all along."

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