My post about music metadata garnered a few interesting comments (thanks!), not least from Ben Magnetbox, who has posted here several times around this topic, and is involved in the mightily interesting Mixmatcher, which I note is now temporarily in repose. Hope it is temporary because, as Ben notes, it was a real attempt at opening up a faceted approach to music mixes; a form of collaborative metadata generation. Thought it was a great idea, though ultimately hampered (as with Echo it seems) by pesky rights issues i.e. you couldn't hear the music. Still respect is due ...
Commenting on my post, Ben points out how strong Getty Images' work has been in logging metadata around images - perhaps that's a useful analog for further discussion? Also, Ben notes that music metadata can get intensely personal ... and therefore harder to usefully formalise ... it has to be "more literal to be universal", as he puts it.
However, this still strikes me as an opportunity, as increasingly complex networked systems enable us to be universal and specific at the same time; or rather, depending on your preference.
Related: I scribbled down (metaphorically) this snippet from an interview with Leonardo Chiarglione - leader of the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) - a while back, whilst I was still being bowled over by the richness of the Echo UX. Chiarglione believes that metadata will ultimately be more important than the data itself:
"In a world where it's easier than ever to create content -- and maddeningly hard to know exactly what's out there - a surprising amount of power could shift to those who do the best job of indexing and cataloging ... The 20th century belonged to movie studios like Fox. The 21st century will belong to companies that can bring order to an information explosion - companies that can become the entertainment industry's equivalent of Reuters or Dun & Bradstreet."
I agree with Chiariglione's original assertion - that metadata will be supremely important - but when he says: "producers who care to have their programs watched will have to describe their content as fully and as engagingly as possible", he's only telling half the story. It's not just about producers (though there are important implications for large media organisations) - it's just that we're all producers now, and we'll all be generating that metadata.
[Above quote from an interview with Leonardo Chiariglione]
