On every post I write, I use Ultimate Tag Warrior to insert some Technorati tags, which show up at the bottom of the post. I’ve been thinking lots about metadata lately — and started wondering how useful those tags actually are (and how much traffic they actually generate).
Wikipedia describes metadata as “‘data about data.’ It can generally be thought of as information that describes, or supplements, the central data. For example, metadata produced by digital still cameras describe the settings used for the picture, such as exposure value or flash intensity. In such cases, the metadata can be considered as extra data, which merely add information, and is not critical to the functions of the main data.”
More and more often however, metadata doesn’t end up being a few keywords or even supplemental at all. For example, if I want to provide some metadata on the poet T.S. Eliot, I might include his date of birth, birthplace and even some of the titles of stuff that he’s written.
But what if I wanted to provide all of the text he ever wrote as metadata about him? Maybe I also want to provide the entire history of St. Louis, Missouri as well (where Eliot was born)? It would seem that I am no longer providing metadata about another data set, but rather I’m just linking two sets of data together (Eliot’s biography and the text of his works).
In reality, it would appear I’m just providing mesodata (OK, I just made up that word, but I think it accurately describes what I’m talking about). For example, a link on the Web that goes from one body of data to another (from the Eliot biography page to the Eliot writing text page), is really just a small piece of data that indicates to the user how the two things are linked together.
This seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? Well, yes, I wouldn’t say this should come as a great revelation to anyone. But when talking about metadata, too often the assumption is that we’re extracting or creating a small set of data that can be used to describe the broader data set — when it can often be the opposite.
So how does this relate to Technorati? Well, I want to know how useful these tags are that I’m sticking on every post on this site. Does this user-created metadata really improve the findability of the information I’m posting (on Technorati, but also on Google or other search engines as well)?
Here’s the experiment: I’m going to tag this post with the top 10 search terms on Technorati and see how much (if any) traffic comes to this site through searches on those terms on Technorati, Google or other search engines. I don’t really have any prediction for what will happen when I do this — I just hope to get some indication of how useful this metadata actually is.