In reply to Harold Jarche » Born in a storm. Metadata is dead - long live metadata
I believe metadata is dead – we are just not ready to accept it. Think about our education pattern – from very beginning we start to categorize ‘objects’ into different boxes. We focus on the ‘box’ rather than a pattern matching and relationship of the objects. In KM Asia Dave Snowden illustrated this point by asking the audience to do a simple ‘odd man out’ from ‘Cow, Chicken and Grass’. Most of the audience took out grass from the list, because that is the only vegetable in the list. This is categorization, putting things into boxes – folders or metadata, whatever you call it. Now if we look from another perspective – Cow eats Grass, so Chicken is the odd man out – that’s pattern matching – tagging – where I have the flexibility to define the perspective itself.

Problems with folders and metadata – that’s a closed system, somebody else define the taxonomy. Theory of entropy proves itself when the closed system of folders and metadata goes into a complete chaotic mode.

Yesterday Dave Pollard mentioned in his post on PKM:

The old model, which we pursued from 1994-2004, is focused on content and collection — the acquisition, organization & aggregation, storage and dissemination of content under organization-wide taxonomies using customized tools and containers, just-in-case it might be reusable. The new PKM model, which we believe will replace it, is focused on context and connection — connecting to the right people just-in-time, canvassing them to gain their knowledge and advice in the context of a particular business problem or pursuit, synthesizing that knowledge and applying it to the issue at hand.

And that’s what tagging does; providing the context in a social perspective.

Thanks for raising this ‘disturbing’ question.