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He never says any of these problems are fundamentally insurmountable. Just that you need to take any meta-data with a large grain of salt. Which, well, is exact
by lambda 11y ago
He never says any of these problems are fundamentally insurmountable. Just that you need to take any meta-data with a large grain of salt. Which, well, is exactly what Google does. It uses certain metadata, but doesn't trust it absolutely.
Also, he mentions Google in this essay; this was written after the emergence of Google, when Google was trouncing all of these other services that tried to use metadata embedded in webpages or tried to classify all websites into some big hierarchy.
- crusso 11y agoNah, his argument goes beyond just the meta data itself. It's about meta data and whether or not we can use it. A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. The comment at the end of the essay about Google looks to be half throw-away. It's like he showed the essay to someone before he published and they said, "but Google", so he put a comment about Google in there without acknowledging that they were wrecking his essay. Additionally, he never mentions the positive feedback loop created by companies like Google that tend to encourage good meta data creation by punishing the obvious crap.