"Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet.so human categorization can be capricious and filled with undertainty. this has been a well observed fact since aristotle and the scholastics decided it would be big fun to walk around and bin everything into not-so-tidy categories that people have been debating since about five minutes after they started saying that's a dog and that's a platypus
"Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.
"This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions."
"A number of programmers have described their class hierarchies as being "brittle". Class hierarchies are often used to represent taxonomies. In the "real world", the term "taxonomy" refers to the system of biological classification into phyla, genus, species and so forth. In the software domain, the term is sometimes used to refer to a hierarchical categorization of a diverse set of objects. An example would be the various flavors of widgets in a moden GUI environment.yup. more than laziness and hubris - things are complicated. and it's certainly a craw in metadata's jaw. and yet - it moves [ with apologies to galileo ], as yahoo and dmoz prove. there is, in certain cases, value in a good ol' fashioned human intervention.
However, real object collections aren't always hierarchical."
“"it is hard to be brave," said piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal." rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "it is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us."”
the complete tales & poems of winnie the poohthis site chronicles the continuing adventures of my son, odin, who was unexpectedly born on the fourth of july at 25 weeks gestation, weighing 1 pound 7 ounces.
he's quite a fighter and you can always send him a postcard to the most current address listed here if you're inspired by his adventures. see the postcard project/google maps mashup to see a map of the postcards.
if you're new, you can browse the archives to catch up. and don't forget to watch a few movies that i made while we were in the neonatal intensive care unit. or if you want the abridged version and you can find a copy, you can read about his adventures in the november 2005 issue of parents magazine.
daddytypes
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blogging baby
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rebeldad
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thingamababy
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The Continuing Adventures of Super-Preemie
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dooce
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