Nothing takes the fun and personality out of writing like metadata. Josh Allen recently quoted Kevin Fanning as saying: When I'm old, here's how I'm going to describe the early 21st century: "We were always having to provide people with content. As software developers, photographers, writers, and users struggle to organize creative work so that people can locate what they're after, the work itself has necessarily been de-emphasized.
Could be, though, that we don't yet possess an aesthetic of metadata. What's the fundamental difference between data and metadata, from a semiotic perspective? Nothing concrete. Trackback pings do have meaning; so do categories. The notion that there's some "real" writing under the metadata is a fiction--a working fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
[via kottke.org]
Posted by johndan at December 21, 2003 03:38 PM
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