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2.1 People lie
Metadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell
their goods, cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories
(mea culpa), artists compete for audience. Attention spans and
wallets may not be zero-sum, but they’re damned close.
That’s why:
>
A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-
engine like AltaVista will often turn up at least one porn
link in the first ten results.
>
Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like “Re: The
information you requested.”
>
Publishers Clearing House sends out advertisements that
holler “You may already be a winner!”
>
Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords
attached to them.
Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning
the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get
awfully toxic in short order.
2.2 People are lazy
You and I are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating
information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the
importance of creating and maintaining excellent metadata for
our information.
But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their informa-
tion. Your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half
the pages on Geocities are called “Please title this page,” and your
boss stores all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like
“UNTITLED.DOC.”
This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end
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