Saturday May 8

Humility

It's good to keep a sense of humility as we create these technologies that we expect to "change the world". The semantic web is one of those grandiose visions make me all wet sometimes. Here is a great essay by Cory Doctorow that counters the entire philosophy behind metadata and the semantic web:

MetaCrap

Doctorow concludes that "implicit metadata" like link popularity on Google is more useful than authored metadata. Still, even this metadata should be taken with a grain of salt, as the "Power Law" theorizes that popularity doesn't indicate quality, merely the viral accumulation of popularity itself. Me thinks that metadata is useful only when it is:

1. From a trusted source
2. Kept up to date as the object it represents changes

I'm one of those ultra-organized freaks who loves to keep meta-data, but even I have to admit that it rarely serves any practical purpose. I'm not quite ready to give up, though!