Wired has just posted the first in the Everything Is Miscellaneous series of podcast interviews I’ve done on the topics in my book (which, by the way, was officially published today). The series is co-sponsored by the Berkman Center. (A transcript is also posted.)
The first is with Cory Doctorow, who talks about his Metacrap article about the problems with explicit metadata. I think they’ll be posting one a week at the Wired business blog.
Coming up in the: Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost, Craig Newmark of CraigsList, astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, Kayak’s Paul English, the BBC’s Richard Sambrook, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the DailyKos. [Tags: podcasts cory_doctorow everything_is_miscellaneous berkman wired metadata metacrap]
Congrats on the book! Looking forward to reading it :-)
(read the transcript) Nice interview.
I think “Metacrap” is a great rant. It’s a handy thing to be able to whip out on that rare occasion that someone both understands a need for a lot of hand entered precise data and fails to recognize how hard it is to get people to enter that data in an accurate and precise way, let alone enter a lot of it that way.
I don’t really get the explicit vs implicit metadata distinction. (And, I won’t even try to parse between thoughts of “explicit meta-ness” vs “explicit data,” etc., either.)
Is Cory’s distinction really just one between human produced / hand-entered data and computer produced / computer recorded data? Or, some combination whereby the computer does the work of dealing with the data, so that, at worst, you get only computer “errors” and “mismatches” rather than human “lies” and “disagreements”?
It’s the difference between a library catalog card getting dog-eared because people keep referring to it and asking someone to come up with five keywords to describe themselves. The implicit is left behind in the course of doing something else. The explicit is created by a human thinking about it.
Or so I understand it.
“The implicit is left behind in the course of doing something else. The explicit is created by a human thinking about it.”
As someone who does “user research,” I deal a lot with the discrepancy between what someone can be observed doing and what they say they’re doing.
So, maybe Cory’s implicit / explicit metadata idea is more accurately described as: observed / reported information.
[…] and had some trouble understanding the essence of distinction. So, I asked for clarification in a comment on David’s post about the interview, and David clarified: It’s the difference between a […]