Cory Doctorow is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person.  He writes science fiction normally.  He is also on the masthead of Wired, Popular Science, and MAKE.  He freelances for the New York Times and Salon.

I found a great web article of his about Metacrap in the Metautopia.  I think it is spot on.

If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

2. The problems

There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as we know it and meta-utopia.

If you have read any of my writings, you know that I love snarky writing.  Take a couple of minutes to check out his rant.

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Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture Reading, Watching and Listening

Adecco Group North America commissioned a Harris Interactive survey about how Boomers and Gen Y workers would set their salary requirements for environmentally friendly companies.

Moreover, firms that adopt strong green policies could find that it saves them money when looking to recruit younger staff.

Almost a third of respondents said that they would be willing to sacrifice a portion of their salary to work for an environmentally friendly firm with Generation Y workers saying they would sacrifice, on average, 6.2 per cent of their wages. In contrast, environmentally conscious baby boomers would be willing to sacrifice just 2.5 per cent.

Of course, saying that you would take less money and actually signing for less money could be two different things.  But the survey does show me that there is yet another difference between Boomers an Gen Yers.

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture Generations in the Workplace

Brent Green, author of Marketing to Boomers, has a blog entry that analyses (or is it attacks) a 60 Minutes segment on Generation Y in the workplace.  His entry, Boomer Bosses, Generation Y Employees, is scathing in its response:

A representative Safer observation:

"Faced with new employees who want to roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday, companies are realizing that the era of the buttoned down exec happy to have a job is as dead as the three-Martini lunch."

This flip of a journalistic middle finger at a young generation is not new. Boomers were often criticized during their ascendance into adulthood, when the young, determined and idealistic were hell-bent on changing the nation’s social realities. (As well documented by Professor Leonard Steinhorn, that determination eventually helped the nation become far more socially and economically inclusive for women, for racial minorities and for people thought as odd when compared to the narrow strictures of 1950’s value consensus.)

I have actually seen the "roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still be CEO by Friday" attitude with my team members.  My perception on this attitude is that if there is anyone slammed by this it is the Boomer society that raised these workers.  So while Green believes that expressing such fatigue at a generation that has different social norms than the previous generation is a commentary on that generation, I believe it is a commentary on the previous generation.

Flip flops?  I hate them at work -- not because they are casual, but because they are annoyingly noisy.  They remind me of dorm days, listening to other students make their way to the communal showers.  Now dorm rooms have private ensuites, so I'm betting flip flops are worn everywhere other than the shower.  I'm showing my Boomer age by saying that I will always feel these items of apparel belong at home, at the beach, and never anywhere else.   I'm just a crusty old Boomer, I guess.

Rolling in around noon?  Did that Gen Y worker spend 4 hours on a phone call to India starting at midnight?  Did he stay up until 11 PM working on a new set of code?  Or was he in the World of Warcraft form the time he left work until 15 minutes before his noon arrival?  We don't know and it could be any or all of those options.  What I do know is that manager who want to judge productivity solely by a 9 to 5 clock will stop getting all that extra work time out of Gen Yers (and Boomers) if they stick to such a poor measure of effort and accomplishment.

However, that Gen Yer may have had a 9:30 AM meeting with a Boomer business user who waited until 9:45 before giving up and vowing to never agree to meet the Gen Yer again.  The Boomer did this because the Gen Y worker expected to be forgiven for not showing up because she had a good reason.  She didn't think to call to let the Boomer know that he wasn't going to make it because she sent a text message to the Boomer instead.  But the Boomer had (politely) turned off his cell phone for the meeting.  A mis-match of communication methods led by a generational difference in expectations.

Wanting to be CEO by Friday?  Maybe a week from Friday.  This is the one thing that I'm going peg on the Boomer society.  Not Mr. Rogers.  If Mr. Rogers was able to skew the outlook of an entire generation, world wide, then it is a sad commentary on the parents that allowed a TV character to form the entire foundation of their kids outlook on work, life, and getting ahead.  Yes, Fred Rogers said that "you are special", but parents should have been saying that, too, with the proper context of how the world actually works.  If millions of kids had only Fred and Mr. Speedy Delivery to form their tiny minds, why is that the kids fault?  Or a Boomer Boss's fault to judge the appropriateness of this generations' workplace behaviours?

It's not wrong for Boomer Bosses to observe this generation's differing approaches to work or even to personally be annoyed by it.  What is wrong is for them to try to force our outdated view of the world onto people living and inheriting the world we made for them.  That's where the outrage ought to be focused.

Embarcadero Technologies is hosting an online challenge to perform common DBA/data modeler tasks in under a certain time frame.  If you complete the 4 challenges and are a resident of the eligible countries, you get the free t-shirt, too.

Embarcadero Technologies has thrown down the gauntlet to all database administrators, developers and data modelers. We firmly believe that our professional grade, cross-platform database tools, ER/Studio^®, DBArtisan^®, Rapid SQL^® and Embarcadero^® Change Manager^TM, can deliver measurable results in YOUR environment in less than 60 minutes.

For instance, the data model challenge is to reverse engineer a database and publish an HTML report in less than 7 minutes.  I know most of you could beat that time easily.

If you meet the challenges, I'd love to hear about your experience and your times.

Every year Infosecurity performs a security-related experiment.  They ask office workers questions about their passwords, where they work, what they do...then ask for their actual password.  A shocking number of people hand it right over.

OK, so here's the question: Exactly how ignorant are they? The experiment found that out of 576 people questioned this year, 21% were quite happy to reveal their passwords in exchange for candy.

But maybe some of the dire news of late is sinking in, because that number is a heck of a lot lower than when the same experiment was conducted last year. Back then, a whopping 64% of the respondents were willing to give away their passwords. It seems that users have never paid attention to their mother's advice about strangers and candy.

A curious aspect of the results was that, of those willing to trade away their passwords, women were 4.5 times more likely to spill the beans then men. Even more astounding was that 61% of all people surveyed happily revealed their date of birth!

This stuff drives me crazy.  I see people handing over personal data all the time in stores in exchange for a free t-shirt or even a free sample of something.   I always chalked this up to naiveté, but I can point to my own derivative experiment based on the Infosecurity one.  When the results are announced each year, I bring this up at work with my IT peers.  Usually 80% of my co-workers are willing to tell me enough about their passwords for me to guess or find out what it is ("My password is always my girlfriend's birthday, so I never forget it" or "I always use Star Wars, but spelled with a Z instead of an S.") without my even asking. I'd also say 9 times out of 10, talk turns to passwords for the non-user accounts, say the SA password for a production SQL Server.  For some reason, all sense of security of this information goes out the door as the password is almost always mentioned.  I've always wondered if this is because workers don't value these non-personal resources as much as they do their own browser history, e-mail, and YouTube ratings.

I remember meeting with a potential financial advisor for a very large financial institution. Our talk turned to passwords and I told him about the study where people would hand over their passwords for the most trivial of treats.  He rolled his eyes and then said how stupid IT professionals are to require these. I mentioned that I was an IT professional and that strong passwords were the best defense against data theft and fraud.  He then proceeded to talk about all the new online systems that his company was foisting upon him and his clients.  And, of course, then he proceeded to tell us what his login and passwords were and why they were so easy to remember.  I sat their in stunned silence.  His giving out this information was not a great selling point for me for his services.  After having bragged about managing millions and millions of dollars of portfolios for some very famous people, then telling me his login credentials, he had basically showed me he could not be trusted with my data or my finances.  Needless to say, he did not get my business. 

And what is this "women were 4.5 times more likely" to fall for this scheme?  Are we females really that clueless?  Is it that we avoid confrontation or have been raised to never say "no" when asked for a favor?  That number bothers me.  The Register believes it is because women love chocolate more than security.

I remember another conversation with a budding IT professional.  Actually, he was a non-IT professional training to become a professional engineer so that he could then become an IT worker.  (Don't ask; I never understood his career plan, either.)  Anyway, he had been talking to our intern about how secure the newest encryption technology was and how absolutely unbreakable it was.  As a sage (old) IT pro, I had to break the news to both the intern and the IT-wannabe that the encryption technology was useless in an age of social engineering and corporate cluelessness.  Both were flabbergasted that I could possibly question the value of what was probably 32-bit encryption at the time.  They both spouted off mathematical certainties of how many billions of years it would take to crack the code of highly secure encryption.  I tried to explain to them that technology was not the issue most of the time.  The both rolled their eyes and said that I just couldn't understand how big the numbers were. 

So I dragged our IT-wannabe over to the assistant to the CIO's desk and lifted up her keyboard to show him the Post-It note with all the CIOs logins and passwords.  He objected that the list of what were obviously user names and passwords could be anything.  Then I took him over to the DBA set of cubicles and showed him how the whiteboard outside their cubes contained mysterious pairs of what were obvious user names and passwords.  He still didn't believe me.  So he asked the admin assistant the next day how she kept track of all the logins and she showed him that she wrote them down on a Post-It and stuck it under her keyboard.  Then he asked the DBAs if those were credentials on the whiteboard, and they first denied it, then admitted it.  He chalked this up to clueless IT people.  So I walked with him back to his cube, and pointed out that he kept his own log in information on a Post-It note stuck on the side of his monitor.   Cluelessness, indeed.

Some days I feel as if all the work we put into data governance, information quality, and information security is for naught.  Why bother if no one values the data in the first place?

I believe that we data management professionals must hold ourselves to a higher standard that what we see in the rest of the world.  We can go on and on about data quality, information integrity, and information protection.  But if we are giving out passwords right and left, writing passwords on whiteboards, and generally following terrible security practices, how are we ever going to convince the business that they need to treat the data better than we do?

Your thoughts?  Your observations?