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In last week’s posts, I began describing how metadata has failed us – or we, as lazy humans, have failed to use it.

Dr Hayes (David) opined here and here that “indexing isn’t the same as categorizing, but finding belongs to both…”. As always, I have to agree with David – but I also have to say that this is one of the problems with metadata as a descriptor. If we rely on “people” (those lazy things that will sit at a SBUX drive-through for 20 minutes instead of getting out of their car, walking up, and getting a cup of coffee in 8 minutes) to put in metadata, then it doesn’t work.

Indeed David has pointed out the “goof” in my last post. That is, that intrinsic data is that which can be actively indexed anyway. Extrinsic data is innately categorization – because to date it has required “people” (see above) to populate it. And that’s where it falls apart.

The difference between indexing and categorization, at the end of the day, is nerdspeak. My mom doesn’t care how the photos get organized – just that they do, and that (let’s be honest here) there is a minimal amount of “processing” necessary to take the 30 pictures she took today, and make them easily available to the family (this isn’t taking into account the step that should be there, helping her realize that sending 4 5MB pictures via email is a bad idea – love you anyway, mom!).

So what’s my overarching point here? That consumers just want their photos and movies to be available to themselves, and family and friends, as quickly and easily as possible, and not in some way that requires watching 90 minutes of digital goo just to see little Timmy’s first words. Indeed, software should continue to evolve to help consumers apply important metadata to their photos automatically. Hey – you changed locations, you’re not in Dallas anymore – you’re in Orlando – let me offer that. Apple has made many of these steps via their “Faces” feature, and by applying geotagging intrinsics to the iPhone 3G and beyond. Can’t remember where you were? Let me apply a lat/long to it! Only problem is, most non-Apple cameras (digital and video) still don’t support geotagging yet (I expect that to change, but only over the next 3-5 years). And then, they still only apply lat/long, they don’t yet take that data and turn it into information (this lat/long = New York City). Lat/long to the typical consumer are simply nerd porn. They’re useless metadata.

iPhoto (not iMovie, alas) also offers to cut up imported photos into “Events”. By default, events are just photos, correlated by their intrinsic categorization of “date they were taken”. Since cameras today (probably good, since the UI would suck) offer no way to apply any sort of extrinsic “event” data such as a birthday, holiday, vacation, etc, this is probably as good as it will get in the short term.

Faces, on the other hand, attempts to at least help you tag your photos based upon who is in them. But as I found out when discussing this with a person I met up at Terra Burger, it’s only so good. He has two boys, 2 and 5 – and the software cannot yet tell them apart most of the time. So it’s a start – but still leaves a lot to be desired. It also doesn’t work on video yet (and of course Apple still has yet to truly tie video, photo, and archival together in one function – which I think they need to do for Mobile Me to ever be worthwhile).

Long ago, I had ideas about how to help create software for Windows Media Center that would help squish commercials out of the DVR-MS files automatically. It’s actually not terribly hard. Similar logic can be applied to automatically “categorizing” (to use David’s words) video automatically, and then assisting you in processing it. Similarly, pre-processing it in such a way that long “overtakes” of video can be constructively edited down quickly into shareable snippets on Mobile Me or YouTube should become commonplace. But we’re a ways away from that.

My next post will focus on how I work diligently to avoid the overflow of photos and videos (trust me – it’s new to me – even last year’s family trip to Chicago wound up on the editing booth floor for over a year). It’s a struggle, since the software still doesn’t help you much. But I’ll give some advice, and discuss more about how software can help us move past this over the next… decade or so.

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.

Five years ago this week, I left Microsoft. After more than 7 years there, it wasn’t an easy decision to make – but I did. This was after almost 5 years working on the Windows team. During the spring of 2004, when things weren’t honestly the rosiest for Windows Longhorn (what would, after a code reset in summer 2004 followed by much cutting and pasting, become Windows Vista), a co-worker in Windows Marketing and I were having a conversation. It went something like this:

Him: “Have I shown you the beautiful pictures I took on my trip to Egypt with my wife?”
Me: “No – show me. WOW, those are amazing.”
Him: “Thanks – was a great trip. See…” (clicks a button to winnow down the visible set of photos) “these are the ones at Giza…”
Me: “Wait – how did it know that?”
Him: “Oh, I entered the information on each one as a keyword”
Me: “So… you entered keyword info on each of the photos you took?”
Him: “Yup. All of them.”
Me: “How many were there”
Him: “Several hundred”
Me: “You don’t have kids, do you?”
Him: (grins)

This was especially amusing because he actually was the Product Manager (read: the guy who owns the “marketing story”) for WinFS. For those not familiar, WinFS was the abandoned strategy within Microsoft (Windows Longhorn in particular) that we had first announced at PDC 2001. WinFS was an attempt to inject “metadata into the filesystem” – or so the world was told. I won’t go into my entire WinFS tirade here… Grab me sometime and I’ll tell you a story over a beer.

WinFS’ technical foibles aside, it suffered from a classic software problem – solution naivete. Think about it. The story above… How many of you have dust-gathering stacks of:

1. Decades of un-annotated, uncategorized 3×5 photo prints
2. Negatives (or CD originals, now) of said un-annotated, uncategorized photos
3. DVD/CD-R/8mm/Betamax/VHS (or other) video content of barbecues, family reunions, birthdays, bar-mitzvahs, etc
4. Reels of even older audio or video content
5. Slides (yes, I said it, SLIDES!) – my dad fell for this one

Ready? We all do. Yes. Admitting it is the first step. We all suffer from what I like to refer to as “memory to media goo”. It’s where you transact your memories to media, instead of your brain. Never to be seen again until… you finally clean out the closet (as we did several months ago).

The only problem? By the time you find this media again, you can’t remember if that’s uncle Phil, or uncle Bill. You can’t remember if it was your brother’s wedding, or your sister-in-law’s. No, instead, you’ve now forced yourself and your kids to go through ALL the photos again. Even the ones with red-eye, since those came back from the K-Mart photo processing lab too, and the entire 5 hours of VHS from little Timmy’s first  month of life. Not because they’re interesting, heavens no. But because those memories are glued on that media. For good. And there is no way you can pry off the “interesting bits” off and throw out the other 95%.

In my next several posts I’ll discuss exactly why we’re in this rut, how things are getting better (how you can make them better for yourself), and what this means for consumer media and software (hint: it means we’re all headed for a few compromises, where the best format may not win, just like the old Beta vs. VHS war).

I’ve been spending a bit of time looking into something that has bothered me for awhile. I refer to it as “Predatory Utility Software”, or “PUS”.

On Christmas day, I received two pieces of spam. These were admirable because they were able to defeat SpamSieve (my favorite software purchase of 2008). They were frustrating because they offered a piece of… software called “Error Nuker”.

For years, I’ve been telling people that so-called “registry cleaners” don’t do anything, and in fact can be the single most destructive tool you can run in Windows. One bad edit, and you can kill Windows.

I’m not even going to delve into the method that many tools like this use to spread themselves. While not “malware” in the truest sense of the word, spamming novice users, and confusing them to the point that they download tools like this should be illegal.

Windows gets “cruft” in the registry and occasionally in the filesystem over time with the installation, uninstallation, and updating of applications and Windows itself. The thing is, though this cruft in the registry causes your registry hive files to grow in size, it is benign. Tools such as this that lie to users and tell them that “errors” will occur are frankly more malignant than the actual problem they feign to solve.

I ran “Error Nuker” on a test Windows VM. It took quite a bit of time to “scan” my system, telling me each of the locations it was scanning. But you know what? In the end, all it did was point out locations in the registry that referenced files on the disk that were no longer there.

Now, it’s important to note that dead links from the registry are usually the result of uninstalling the application that put them there*. Meaning that, the only thing that cares that the link is dead is the application or application(s) that are no longer there! Meaning it does nothing!

*This tool also calls out files in Most Recently Used (MRU) menu locations in Windows – which if you are like me, you edit, send, and delete documents like crazy. But these MRU links being dead is hardly what I’d call an error condition.

“Error Nuker” is something like $20-$49 (depends on which spammer you get solicited by, I guess). Frankly, it isn’t worth free. It literally does nothing, and although it has a safe delete option, the fact that it is just a glorified registry cleaner means it’s effectively useless. An analogy? Do you think washing your car will make it go faster? Me either.

I’ve seen worse “PUS” – specifically the kind that is truly malware. But it’s really a shame that we’ve gotten to this point, where Windows users will fall prey to junk software pimping itself as fixing Windows’ problems.

You never realize how much you miss something until it’s gone. I’ve been having two problems with my Macs for a few weeks. The first is Office 2008 crashes – across all the apps. Only the second app launched (not the first) and only towards the tail end of the day, not when I first log on. Just one quick bounce on the dock and the app is gone. I hate having issues like that – you feel like an idiot telling someone “it only does it if the machine is facing north and it’s after 2 PM on Thursday.” But seriously — that’s the issue. The second was as of yesterday (suspiciously after installing VMware Fusion Beta 2 – now removed from the suspect list), my context-menu for right-click completely disappeared. Poof. Gone. Histoire. You do NOT realize how much you need that context-menu until it won’t show up. In speaking with a co-worker, he highlighted the fact that I’ve got eye-candy gunk (Candybar) that does some hacktastic things to make the desktop purty. Sure enough, I disabled the themeing, and now the context-menu is back. We’ll see if the Office issue is better now too. I’m optimistic that it is. On an up note, VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 is AWESOME. Ever so much closer to my beloved VMware Workstation on Windows (oh how I miss it’s features). In fact, I’d say that there are not many apps that I actually miss from Windows – but there are a few. I’ll try to post them. But VMware Workstation is one. It’s funny for me, since I’ve been a VMware fan/user for so long (since it was the virtualization standard AT MICROSOFT), I’ve watched Workstation grow up. Today, Fusion is really an analog to a Workstation version 3 or 4, IIRC. More than one snapshot being there in 2.0 is critical to me – so it’s nice to see that. Now, I just wish they’d add private networking. But I understand that the “nerd features” that make it useful for me as a software development tool in Workstation don’t always help sell Fusion, which seems to be hardcore targeted at consumers for now (not that that’s bad).