The metadata comeback, the revenge of the librarians
Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability talk at ETech got better as the talk progressed. Since I had already read the book some of his examples and theories were known to me (but I always like to see the author). My favorite sentence from his talk: “A wealth of information creates a poorness of attention”. I also like his point about how librarians are important again (”the revenge of the librarians”) and how metadata has become sexy again. Very relevant to what we do at my company was his point about how the new tagging and collectively defined clusterings of information (like Flickr is doing with images recently) is not necessarily the best way for corporations where the amount of users is not large enough and therefore the classical approach of building taxonomies and using metadata with a control vocabulary is better suited.
CD
