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Ratings privilege 30- and 60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesn\'t show videos any more -- Nielsen couldn\'t generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and so MTV couldn\'t demonstrate the value of advertising on its network), raw megahertz scores privilege Intel\'s CISC chips over Motorola\'s RISC chips. 
 
Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring axes. 
 
It\'s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. 
 
2.7 There\'s more than one way to describe something 
 
\"No, I\'m not watching cartoons! It\'s cultural anthropology.\" 
 
\"This isn\'t smut, it\'s art.\" 
 
\"It\'s not a bald spot, it\'s a solar panel for a sex-machine.\" 
 
Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas. 
 
And that\'s just not right. 
 
3. Reliable metadata 
 
Do we throw out metadata, then? 
 
Of course not. 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. 
 
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. 
 
Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person\'s value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world\'s schema combined.  
 
$$$$ 
 
Amish for QWERTY 
 
(Originally published on the O\'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003) 
 
I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can\'t write anything of significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I\'m well adapted to the modern reality of technology. There\'s a secret elitist pride in touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers flourishing and caressing the keys. 
 
But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some very nice people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest camera-phone, the kind of gadget I\'ve described in my science fiction stories. As I prodded at the little 12-key interface, I felt like my father, a 60s-vintage computer scientist who can\'t get his wireless network to work, must feel. Like a creaking dino. Like history was passing me by. I\'m 31, and I\'m obsolete. Or at least Amish. 
 
People think the Amish are
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