Metadata is Democratic

Despite the increasing ease with which we can publish our own content, the simplest form of self-expression will always be in the form of the metadata that is automatically generated and published anytime we pay attention to anything. Attention data in the form of our clickstreams, our browsing history, our audio and video playlists, our email headers--you name it--has the potential to be a powerful democratizing force, reflecting the preferences of those who lack the time, access, ability or inclination to do so through content of their own.

We're closing in on 100 million blogs, perhaps the most democratic form of content creation. But even as we suffer from blog-overload and our aggregators are buried in posts, it's worth remembering that even 100 million blogs represents just 10 percent of the more than 1 billion Internet users around the world. Content production is still and may always be a means of expression for the privileged. And as barriers to content creation decrease, the likelihood that your human-readable content will actually rise above the din and find an audience decreases as well. As a good friend told me, "I don't want to read your movie reviews." Point well taken--my movie reviews aren't that good.

But I'd like to think that my taste in movies is good--or at least that it's relevant to my friend. And machine-readable attention data is not only easy to generate and publish, it's easy to share and make relevant via intelligent attention services. Even assuming I take the time to publish a movie review on my blog, my friend isn't going to take the time to read it--or the reviews written by any of his other friends. But an attention service that simply told him which of his friends had seen (or not seen) a certain film would provide him with useful information while taking just a few seconds of his time.

And more to the point, such attention services would allow us all to have a voice--to express our preferences--through our every action. This isn't to say that the implicit gestures that make up content consumption should (or even could) substitute for the explicit gestures (and the critical thinking) that are reflected in every act of content creation. We'll always need both. But right now, the vast majority of our preferences, expressed through our metadata, are vanishing into the ether (or, at best, into databases over which we have no control.) And the vast majority of people have essentially no opportunity to create content of their own.

One more reason why it's important that individuals have the ability to control their data.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+economy metadata