Cheap Metadata
For years, we have heard otherwise intelligent people carp about how ?metadata will never work?. But history has marched on, showing example after example of sucecssful applications of metadata. The nabobs have been forced to continually tweak their embarassing position, now warning us all that ?application of metadata to problem X using technique Y will almost certainly fail?.
Dare recently revisted the arguments of one of these inexplicablyrevered metadata haters. Now Clay revisists the metadata-antagonism of the otherwise venerable Tim Bray. I look forward to the day when everyone thinks as clearly as Dare and Clay, and I’ll be able to wind down my years-long campaign against all haters of metadata, which has sapped me of so much family time.
In any case,I’m not quite as optimistic about tagging as Clay is, and he has a maddening habit of over-classifying and over-categorizing things (?the characterteristics of cheap metadata are… take notes, class…?) But he blasts apart the fallacy of ?there is no cheap metadata?.
We are swimming in metadata. It’s everywhere. Saying that ?there is no cheap metadata? is even more incorrect than saying ?there is no cheap opinion?. Opinions come pretty darn cheap, and metadata is just a way of sharing opinions. And with metadata, your car can share an opinion about the road conditions, with no effort at all on your part.
And Claynails the most imortant point — when the value of the metadata grows with aggregation (or sharing in general), then the perceived cost of producing it becomes much less important. Considering that we live in a time and place where we can enjoy a cheap meal that includes food from all corners of the globe and involving a supply chain of thousands of human laborors, it’s bewildering that anyone would focus on the expense of the supply chain anyway. Producing and distributing food is infinitely more expensive than producing metadata, and the potential gains to humanity from advances in metadata distribution are comparable to the gains we got by switching from hunter-gatherer to agriculture.
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Recent history has amply proved that there is healthy demand curve for good metadata, and there is certainly a huge supply potential. This is how it always has been through human evolution — the supply and demand curves for human communication have always been very strong. The people who focus on supply or demand are ignoring the human condition since Babel. The problem has always been in the distribution network. Sharing your opinions with other humans is similar to loading your back with furs to hike through the snow to the trading post. With modern telecommunications, we are more capable than ever of sharing our assertions with one another, but we are still hopelessly primitive compared to where we could be. When I want someone’s insight on a particular topic, I still have to know who to ask, or how to find out, and my research leads me down many disjoint paths. Until humans can publish their assertions transparently to a single ?cloud?, and all hum ans have access to that cloud, there will still be huge value to be gained from improvements to the distribution network. And that’s not a mtter of supply and demand — it’s a matter of time. The supply and demand is there.