Category Archives: Information usage patterns

Geoff Nunberg on Google Books metadata

Posted on 2009-09-03 by Dan Rabin

Linguist Geoff Nunberg comments on the poor general quality of metadata in Google Books, and why that’s a problem. It’s a tough problem: if you do things (like scanning entire libraries) at Google-scale, you just can’t pay attention to the … Continue reading →

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The two cultures

Posted on 2009-06-24 by Dan Rabin

Jon Stokes has an excellent description of the two contrasting philosophies of information management in his comparison of the Palm Pre and the iPhone. He names the two approaches “structure-and-browse” and “collect-and-query”. I feel like I’ve been groping for these … Continue reading →

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Chris Anderson: One size metadata doesn’t fit all

Posted on 2007-03-21 by Dan Rabin

Misfits of Metadata Chris Anderson of The Long Tail has an important post about how the metadata used in some music-listening applications doesn’t satisfy the listeners needs: [...] classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes … Continue reading →

Posted in Areas of application, Information Philosophy, Information usage patterns, Metadata, Musical | Leave a comment

OpenStreetMap constructs maps from GPS tracks!

Posted on 2007-02-21 by Dan Rabin

Sources and uses of digital information are in-scope for this blog, and a great example just showed up in my RSS reader today. OpenStreetMap is a wiki-like project to build a world map using contributed GPS tracks [OpenGeoData pointed me … Continue reading →

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