By Karen Lopez on Monday, April 28, 2008 1:22 PM

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.

By Karen Lopez on Wednesday, April 02, 2008 3:57 PM

 

Karen Lopez from InfoAdvisors will be presenting "Collaborating with the Newer Generations of Developers and DBAs: A Survival Guide for Data Architects."

[Note from Karen:  In case you've attended one of my recent presentations on this subject, this one has new and more technique-specific content than those presentations]

The ERSIG organizers are pleased to announce the first 2008 ERSIG meeting to take place Wednesday, April 9 at 5PM UTC /6PM BST /1PM EDT

/12 PM CDT /11AM MDT /10AM PDT.

There will be a Q&A session following the presentation.

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Wednesday, April 9 at 5PM UTC /6PM BST /1PM EDT /12 PM CDT /11AM MDT /10AM PDT

Meeting URL:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/embarcadero/join?id=AprilERSIG&role=attend&pw=AprilERSIG

Alternate URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/embarcadero/join

Meeting ID: AprilERSIG

Meeting Key: AprilERSIG

Audio Conferencing (Toll): +1 (702) 902-0735 Audio Conferencing (Toll-free): +1 (866) 533-0065 Participant Code: ERSIG

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The ERSIG is a user-driven, Embarcadero sponsored online special interest group that brings together ER/Studio users for the purpose of exchanging ideas and information related to data modeling and ER/Studio.

ERSIG meets online for an hour every other month. Users from the ER/Studio community will present on a variety of topics and we will have a Q&A session following the presentations. Please visit http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/usergroups.html for all the latest ERSIG information.

We hope to see you online.

You can join the ERSIG by visiting

http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/usergroups.html .