Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

# This is about user-supplied metadata : From a post on D. Weinberger's site:

Ian Black of Autonomy says that the Auutonomy project head at Ford's training department says 'Metadata is for the birds' because his department generates 5 million new objects per month, too much for manual tagging.

The last sentence should read something like, "...too much for manual tagging of every item by the authors."

However, much of the recent discussion of tagging is about users of these objects tagging them. They may create 5 million objects per month, but how many of those are actually used? How many of those would an individual, alone or part of a group, feel is valuable enough to tag for their own retrieval or for someone else's discovery?

The current state of the discussion around tagging is very much of the 'blind men and the elephant' variety. Throw out the word 'tagging', and the discussion that comes up is rarely based on a common agreement of what questions we are even trying to answer.

Ed Bilodeau

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Comments: