“You Own Your Own Metadata”

“You Own Your Own Metadata” — Will Kreth’s wonderful piece on the need for portable metadata standards. I’m not totally sold on the metadata thing.

I wonder:

  • how it is you keep people from spamming/spoofing

  • how to ensure that we have a common vocabulary — you say “Watching cartoons,” and I say “Cultural Anthropology,” and do we really need to come to accord on what to call it?

  • and how to convince people to enter, spellcheck and lint their own metadata — you can get great bargains by searching for “Plam Pilot” on eBay; and it seems like half of the tracks on Napster have no artist/title info, despite the ease with which one can import ID3 stuff using the CDDB

Nevertheless, this article makes a compelling case for putting your metadata back into your own hands. Good stuff.

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