Adventures in My Mind
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Sep 6, 2001
As a user experience consultant, information architecture plays a big part in my professional life. Classifications, schema, taxonomies, hierarchies, et al, are terms that are bandied about on a regular basis. The biggest players in the information architecture field right now are metadata and it's primary programming delivery vehicle XML. Many in the tech industry have decided that metadata and XML will revolutionize the Internet, finally taiming the chaotic, multi-headed beast and bringing it to heal. They ask us to imagine a time when search results are clear and concise, when product databases across different sites are structured identically, when comparison shopping is made easy.
"Sounds great," you say? Well, me, too! But before we all put on our rose colored glasses on and march hand-in-hand over the horizon toward Utopia let's remember that this type of "irrational exuberence" brought us the Tech Bubble and it's subesequent bursting. The tech industry is often handicapped by putting all of its eggs in one basket. It boldly, and often blindly, charges from one latest/greatest thing to the next. Specifics go undefined, and varibles aren't accounted for. Much time and even more money is wasted on this type of fickleness of thought. The same is now occurring with metadata.
Cory Doctorow of Craphound and Boing Boing Blog has written this article, Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, on the dangers and drawbacks of looking at metadata as a panacea for the woes of disorganization. It's excellent and well worth a read.
0 Comments | Link to this post posted by Teddy 10:09 AM
