Category: "Business"
Some Futures of Metadata
By JAdP on October 14th, 2005
In Computers and Internet, Business
"The future of metadata", according to Tara, Miss Rogue of HorsePigCow involve things like geotagging and will be driven by Life Caching. [Tara - I love reading your blog, you alwas inspire me to comment.] 
I agree with her article, that's one reason our blogs are geotagged - though we may need to remove the BlogMap for performance reasons, the geotags will remain.
Life Caching is one reason to tag text, audio, photographic, video and all other data that you encounter, but other reasons are sharing, collaborating, retrieving and analysing.
As I recently wrote in an email stemming from another blog - comment - email interaction, metadata puts the data into context. Some things that come to mind include source(s), location, time, topics, and target audience, from both the tagging service's point of view and the users.
But there's even more to it than that. Metadata is the conversation about the data, not just the data about the data.
And the amount of data that will come from each of us being an equal participant in the web, each being simultaneously a producer as well as a consumer of, well, everything will make for a huge and wonderfully interesting opportunity for automating, categorizing and learning from that conversation about the data. Oh, and if you've been reading our posts for some time, you know that by "us" we don't just mean the humans. Think Life Caching, think production, but also think Zigbee, RFID, Smart Dust and nanites. We always consider three possible interactions in every conversation: H2H, H2M and M2M.
Yep, yep, yep... that new business plan is taking shape.
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet; Business
Open Source and the Long Tail
By JAdP on September 14th, 2005
In HonorTagAdvocate, Open Source, Business
Bernard Golden recently turned Clarise and I onto a series of articles documenting Chris Anderson's talk at the Churchill Club, "The Long Tail: Finding New Markets in the Niches".
It's interesting that Chris Anderson brings up Open Source at the end of the fifth and final part of the talk. Open Source is all about niches, and making a niche work as a market is all about community. And as we all know, succeeding with an Open Source project depends upon building the community around it.
Open Source is very much D.I.Y. There are over 100,000 projects listed with SourceForge. These projects provide the framework to have software do exactly what you need it to do for your niche. One problem is to break out of the D.I.Y. crowd of programmers, and bring these wonderful capabilities to those who need it most, the SMB market. Those niche businesses run by creative individuals who definitely don't have the time, and may not have the desire to customize an Open Source project to do what they need. We're striving to solve this problem in a variety of ways.
But more about that another time.
Technorati Tags: Business, Open Source
