Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Music, metadata, and ebay

Due Diligence (Tim Orens’ blog) has been fairly active recently. There’s a discourse between Kevin Kelly and Kevin Laws on the state of the music industry and its future. That’s where I found Kevin Kelly’s NYT article written a few years back. Very good read; here’s a quote I liked:

But the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation is suddenly inverted. When nighttime electrical lighting was new, it was the poor who burned common candles. When electricity became easily accessible and practically free, candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.

The whole topic of metadata seems to be making its rounds again, and Tim gives an amusing rant. That’s where I found Cory Doctorow’s metacrap manifesto. I particularly love section 2.3:

2.3 People are stupid

Even when there’s a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation.

Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for “plam” on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for “Plam Pilots.” Misspelled listings don’t show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay.

Sure enough, a search on ebay with “plam” returns 7 hits (though 2 are tree references) even to this day. At least they’re not in marketing.