Explaining Metadata with Velcro Covered Balls

One of the things I emphasise to people wanting their internet presence to work for them is that they need good metadata, which is shorty followed by then asking what the hell metadata is, if they don’t just go blank. Wikipedia is worth a look of course and a nice example can be found behind the title page of every book on your shelf – a list of information about that book: who published it, in what year, which country, who owns the copyright, the ISBN and so forth. Add to this systems of library classification such as Dewey and you’ve got a comprehensive way of telling how books relate to each other.

So why is metadata so important when you’re dealing with the social internet? Here’s an analogy I came up with while trying to explain it to Anthony Hughes.

Imagine a room full of strips of material hanging from the ceiling gently blowing in a breeze caused by fans around the room. This is the internet.

You have in your hand a spongy ball, the sort that weighs pretty much nothing. This is your content, your piece of Internet Stuff. It could be a video, photo, essay, anything at all. You want people to read it so you throw it into the room.

It touches a few strips here and there as it flies through the room but quickly lands on the floor. This is a representation of the traffic you generate for your content after you publish it – a few hits and then nothing. Here’s a graphical representation:

Now, cover that ball in velcro. Each strip of velcro represents a piece of metadata that describes it. For the sake of simplicity we’ll stick with tags which you’ll be familiar with from Flickr or YouTube. The more tags you apply to your ball, the more likely it is to stick to something as you throw it into the room.

So you throw it in and it sticks to 5 strips, suspending it in mid-air. It’s become connected to the living internet and has, if you will, an audience. As the wind blows through the room other strips touch the ball, some of them just brushing it, some sticking to it, while others let go. The ball moves around the room, sometimes tangled up in a mass of strips, sometimes just with a few, but never down on the dark floor of obscurity. The metadata is what keeps it alive.

Now, does some crafty artist want to build me this as a 3D working model so I don’t have to use these cack-handed diagrams?