Handling the Meta-Data
This post gets today's over-simplification award:
First of all, one of the things that we need to do is to make applications that encourage the capture of this data and that make it simple to add and difficult to forget. For years, Office apps have had the facility to prompt for summary information when you save if you so choose. In addition, some data can be automatically derived from your documents - smart tags show one particular way that this can happen.
Make it easy to enter? How would that work? I enter a document. I want to save it. Unless you are planning to automatically grab information from the text, anything you prompt me with is going to irritate me. The liklihood of
- Me going out of my way to enter meta information
- The system capturing anything useful on an automated basis
is low - very, very low. The reality, getting meta information on data takes work - data entry work. No one likes data entry work, plain and simple.
Comments
meta-data
[keith ray] November 11, 2003 22:52:17.620
MacOS 9 (and X, I believe) has "Get Info" comments on files. One of the useful automated uses for that was that any file downloaded from a web-browser had its URL in the Get Info comment -- IE and other browsers did this on 9, but I don't think all (or any?) the browsers on X are doing this.
Untitled
[Hmmm...] November 13, 2003 15:00:40.869
And I assume the computer will derive the proper context of the content I am handling, and will properly pick out the right meta-data for me. If Google can't do this today on the web, why should the computer do this for me on my desktop? Joe user needs a very intuitive way of organizing his stuff. Personally, I have shelves, drawers, boxes, file cabinets, etc. I exploit my spatial memory abilities to recall where stuff is when I need it. I don't put everything in folders because everything looks the same - plus I would have to go find everything in a file cabinet, including books, cds, music, etc. I have no spatial memory advantage here, I would have to go through the labels to find what I want. Different places for different things is a better hash than looking up a label by name in a hopefully sorted collection, period. Why can't we have a shelf, a drawer, a suitcase, a chest or a tiny-metal-piece-drawer-organizer on our desktop in addition to a file cabinet? Compare this to the effect of learning to use the Star Browser and using it over the regular browser.