Wonderful transcript of an interview of Cory Doctrow (in case you don’t feel like listening to the podcast like me)
Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow
Cory: Well, the problem with explicit metadata, as I sum up in the essay, is manifold. But it’s that people lie; they tell you what they think you want to hear. Or, they tell you what they think they believe, even if it’s not what they actually believe. People are dumb, right? They sometimes just have bad classification information. People are lazy, so they misclassify because they can’t be bothered to properly classify. We can’t all agree; everything is miscellaneous, as you say, so we can’t all agree on the best way to classify information, and so on. So, that’s a kind of sampler of the reasons that the idea that we’ll all make it all work is so flawed.
I remember stopping by the booth of a company that made some kind of metadata product at a PC Forum conference, Esther Dyson’s old conference out in the desert in Arizona. They said, “We’ve got this metadata program, and it has this taxonomy that describes the best way to organize all the information in the world, and this is what we’ve deployed, ” and so on. I said, “What do you do if your taxonomy doesn’t agree with someone else’s?” And they said, “Oh, well that’s easy. We have a way of trying a line between those taxonomies. So, if you call it a widget and we call at a what’s-it, we can just make an equivalent between those two and map them over.”
I remember at the moment thinking that there was something missing from that explanation. It was a little while later that I figured out what it was, which is what if you call it a widget and I don’t have a name for it. Or, what if you call it a widget and I disagree that it should be called anything at all? You know, you say that this is the sovereign territory of Serbia-Montenegro, and you say, no, that it’s a suburb of Serbia. They are just a lot of categories of information that we can’t draw lines between in our rival taxonomies.
David: You say it’s a species, and I say it’s, in fact, just an offshoot.
Cory: Right. Or, you say that it’s a genuine religious experience of Numanis and I say that it’s a hallucination triggered by a center of your brain left over from when some distant ancestor of yours discovered that by hallucinating a god figure, he was able to survive longer, catch more antelopes, and therefore have more babies. And so, I want to classify this as hallucination engendered by accident of evolution and you want to classify it as genuine religious experience. I have a feeling that both of us would be slightly peeved if the other’s label were applied to it.