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Taxonomies, folksonomies, and my love/hate relationship with my iPod

21-Feb-2007

Tags: Web Content and Experience Management, Information Architecture, CMS

Last week The Malcontents invited me and Tim Denby (formerly of Web CMS vendor Ektron and now an independent consultant) on their podcast to banter about a few of my favorite topics, taxonomies and folksonomies, and the advantages/disadvantages of each. It was particularly timely for me to be part of a podcast on this topic, as I'm just getting acquainted with my new iPod. Admittedly, obsessive about metadata as I am, very little bothers me more than how bad most CD metadata is when you rip the songs into iTunes. There's a lesson to be learned by importing 20 CDs of Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos: no two collections of recordings list the composer's name the same way: Beethoven; Ludwig van Beethoven; van Beethoven, Ludwig; Beethoven, Ludwig van; L. V. Beethoven, and so on. Some put his name in the "artist" field (as if he's playing on the CD!), others, the "composer" field, which at least makes good sense. Either way, it's an inconsistent mess that makes the otherwise fabulous faceted navigation on the iPod terribly annoying, because I end up with 8 different collections for the same composer. The best user interfaces will still suffer when content metadata is inconsistent, and every day with my iPod, it's quod erat demonstrandum. Don't let your corporate content suffer the same fate, and establish standards for your metadata, as Tim and I argue in this podcast. Now, I'll go back to normalizing the metadata in my iTunes...

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