February 02, 2003
Cutting off the meta nose to spite the meta face?
It seems the people afraid of what abuses could be done with metadata are continuing to think it's pointless to even bother to try. This is stupid. Once again we find people too worried about what could go wrong to ever take the chance. Innovation doesn't come from sitting around being afraid to try.
Bill, can you elaborate a bit more on synthetic meta-data? I'm interested in your comment to Adina's post but felt I was understanding it fully. Thanks. Send an email if you can. Thanks.
Posted by: Greg Elin on February 3, 2003 12:04 PMSure, the elaboration is that synthetic metadata does not work. An overly simply analogy would be to ask a synthetic search to find results on "queer". Now, depending on it's focus you may get some rather different results.
A better example comes from the childrens fable "the boy that cried wolf". The boy was wrong so many times that the villagers eventually didn't listen to him. This is what naive synthetic searches end up doing. The users, whose search forming skills are certainly at fault, ask for something and the results do not help them. They quickly learn not to search because the results won't be what they want.
I greatly simplify it with this argument and I do appreciate more sophisticated search methods can help.
My point, however, is that there's a contingent of people that 'whine' about it being somehow too hard to implement metadata. Or that if they offer up metadata it might somehow be used in unintended ways. As a result they'd prefer nothing get done. Yet they want search results to be correct. This disparity is what bugs me.
