On Twitter, I was reminded of course that metadata (the lack of it) isn’t just a home media problem. It’s pervasive in our lives – especially the more you let technology into your life. I’ll expound upon that later.
In my first post I mentioned WinFS, and why it was symptomatic of the “metadata problem” that we all live with today. I’ve chosen to hone in on home media just because it’s something that we all live with – specifically the problem I mentioned earlier, where we all have media goo that we’ll never share again. Those memories that you took the time to photograph or record – may as well be buried in a cave somewhere never to be seen again.
The key problem here is two-fold. 1) You’ve recorded onto “analog” media. Hey – even if it’s a DVD, you have no way to truly “search” it. Photos are a “hand index” media only unless you begin with digital photos (check out the upcoming post on iPhoto and iMovie as they relate to that). 2) Any references that you may have had to the content of the images/video become lossier the longer you go from the time of capture to the time you try to “catalog” them. You can’t remember which day was which, which cousin was who, or where that boat tour was, and what the name of the lake was that you went across.
Truth be told, we’re all innately horrible at capturing these kinds of details about events and memories. Only the lucky person gets to recall exactly how to get back to where they were driven once without needing a map or directions. Most of us need notes, maps, or other tools to recall the small details – the kinds of things you want to recall when viewing the photos or videos with the kids a year later.
When was the last time you set the metadata properties for a Microsoft Office document you were working on? Wait – you didn’t KNOW you could add metadata properties to Office documents? Well – even if you did, you haven’t set one more times than the number of thumbs you have. I know. Don’t lie to me.
For this reason, I am electing to define two types of metadata. Intrinsic – that which can be innately, directly gathered from the media itself, and extrinsic. My example in my first blog entry in this series, the above example of Office documents, and to a large degree WinFS’ design (as most of us would have experienced it) are all extrinsic. Much like taking the time to catalog a series of 35mm photos or slides, or edit a bunch of VHS-captured memories into any form of tolerable viewing (perhaps even with captions or cataloging), nobody does this. We don’t have the time to do this – at least more than a few times and then we tire of it. Thus, “memory to media goo”. The cool new device or media type becomes frustrating because our initial intention – to share memories with others or preserve them in a useful way for ourselves, is just too damned hard.
Simply put, using extrinsic metadata to organize anything sucks. Even if it works in theory, it doesn’t work at scale, in real life. We all give up and stop trying to use it for all but special cases.
Instead, intrinsic metadata is the future. In my next post, I’ll be discussing intrinsic metadata, what it is and how it works (when it does) and where we’re all going from here.
