Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (2001)

Conclusion, strongly in favor of practical metadata:

"... Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.

"Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

"This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions.

"Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined."

I think "2.5 Schemas aren't neutral" is a valid point, but I don't understand the proposed (conflicting) hierarchies at the bottom. Why are we trying to place these things within a taxonomic tree? That doesn't seem to be an accurate depiction of any real attempts to build a DTD.

Some good points in here; even better is this from Clay Shirky: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html