I don’t know if it is coincidental or not, but Tim Bray decided to write about metadata just days after Christopher Lydon’s interview with David Sifry, in which Sifry, too, spoke eloquently about the power of metadata. Bray hits a few notes I know from bitter experience, too.
Historically, the difficulty of collecting metadata at source has been generally large enough to outweigh the (potentially huge) benefits from collecting it.
(snip)
If you collect metadata by hand the most important lesson I’ve learned, is: Don’t try to collect too much.
Amen.