Cory Doctorow seems to have written a short essay I’ve been meaning to write for some time. In short, metadata sucks.
The semantic web, as embodied by Twine and the like seems like a nice idea at first. If only all that messy information on the web was nicely categorised then all would be well.
It’s a typical CS grad wet dream – taxonomies and hierarchies are what we grew up on. People are messy and computers are the tools we use to organise them.
Of course Yahoo tried this – we all remember how that nice hierarchy killed Altavista and Google right?
Cory’s first point is probably the key technical issue – people lie and even if they don’t they’re idiots. Web ratings have existed for years and might at one point have had the force of law behind them yet they’ve never worked properly and are essentially dead.
The other side of the coin is that semantic technologies are solving a problem that’s increasingly not a problem – my grandmother finds things on Google everyday – even Microsoft seems to have sorted out it’s search these days.

In short, semantic metadata is a great idea that will never usefully work.

John Hughes, director of 16 Candles and the ever classic Ferris Beuler’s Day Off is dead at 54.

Seth Godin asks if he’s the only one who’d pay for HiDefenition voice. Normally I love what Seth writes but in this case, the answer to the question is pretty much yes – virtually no-one wants to pay for good quality telephone calls.
Say what you will about the phone company but AT&T and BT have a wealth of understanding about how to make telephone calls sound good. The theory is well understood and any voice codec comes with a standardised score which will tell you in advance how good it will sound. Today BT will sell you a very high quality VoIP service – problem is no-one wants to pay for it. Consumers have voted with their wallets and they’ve said no.
I sit in meetings every month where very smart engineers talk about how to design the network to support great voice products, all the while taking calls on their mobile phones which sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a well. GSM defines high quality voice codecs for 3G – no mobile company has every succeeded in selling these.
There are many cases where people pay for quality but usually it’s because the standard offering is pretty awful. But though we remember lots of bad quality phone calls, most of the time it’s perfectly adequate. Voice just isn’t that bad today.

I listened to a great harvard podcast the other day about the social contract in relation to business. The concept was simple – in times past companies would look after you beyond simply paying you. In return you would be flexible about how you delivered value and more loyal than otherwise.
This wasn’t a job for life scenario. Companies allowed a myriad of small things which technically they shouldn’t: use of company phones and photocopiers fit personal business; a nod and a wink at the length if your lunch break; trust in your expens report.
What they got were people who took a little mire than they technically shoud, but never overtly stole. When crunch time came employees would work the extra hours and not complain. They’d answer their mobiles on a Saturday.
Now companies are cracking down on all these small niceties exactly when they are also asking employees to take haircut on raises and salary. It’s working because people need their jobs and the bottom line is always easy to bump by a few percent in a push.
But what happens in three years? Rosy scenario is we’re growing again: jobs are easy to find and money is available.
I predict employees will desert these ‘efficient’ companies at the drop of a hat. They’ve shown they dont care about you so why should you care about them?
So why shoud companies care? It’s all business anyway right?
They should care because the old way was a great deal. For fifty bucks a month on tax deductible sundries they got an extra ten hours a month out of execs and people willing to work Saturday. Now they’ve saved their six hundred dollars a year but productivity has dropped – people who went on a five thousand dollar course leave for a competitor – that’s eight years of savings down the drain and you need to find a new person and bring them up to speed.