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Paris Hilton and metadata
If reports are to be believed, even Paris Hilton keeps metadata. The main issues for getting people to produce metadata are: making it of personal value to them and making it easy and apparent to share. Getting general value out of metadata produced for personal consumption is an applied exercise.
Sections: Emerging Practice
Topics: folksonomy IASummit
Did Paris Hilton keep metadata in her cracked T-Mobile Sidekick? It does appear from reports that she labeled her address data with nicknames and tags. Inasmuch as these could be used to infer something about the data being stored: “friend”, “business”, etc., then she kept metadata.
So, people from all walks of life keep and assign metadata, not just the hypertechnical. But, the metadata has to be of value to the person. Further, the person needs to want to share it (Paris did not). It is the combined elements of “it is of value to me”, and “I want to share it” that make informal metadata appear. I raised the issue of sharing with Thomas Vander Wal at his Information Architecture Summit talk on the Personal Information Cloud this weekend.
He concurred that making sharing easy is one of the difficult parts of getting user metadata accessible. Others are not sure this data can be of value, at least not for the usual information architecture purposes of organizing data for general accessibility. Personally, I think more data is better and that it can be used for making information more accessible to individuals in the general population (see this post). I just want also want to make sure that people know what they are sharing.
Bud posted this on March 6, 2005
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