I can’t help it, the word ‘metacrap’ just makes me want to chuckle.
Anyways, there’s a great blog post over on Wired, by David Weinberger – Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow. (transcript and audio available). Lots of useful information and opinion about search challenges, tagging and information rights. Like the following snippet:
No one really worries that when you hit control-r to reply to an email that the first thing it does is make a holis bolis copy of that first email, which is, itself, a copyrighted work, and then allow you to insert your own commentary as an interleaf between the paragraphs. That’s how you know the Internet was designed by engineers, not lawyers.
The interview includes a great discussion about the differences between implicit and explicit metadata, explaining why the former is better for indexing and the latter is better for tagging. (That’s a very simplistic summary, I’d recommend reading the article to get the full perspective.)
Joining Dots 