Holes In Thoughts: Ooh, Baby It's A Wired World

Friday, December 21, 2007

Ooh, Baby It's A Wired World

In the last few years, the file 'tag' has become very important - what's now called metadata. I don't know what the original file tag was; you could say that libraries were the first to extensively catalogue metadata, in that metadata is information about information. But certainly the most important one was the ID3, which was originally created for the MP3 sound file.

Way back when I downloaded my first MP3 file, in 1995, I had to create elaborate folder structures to sort out the organization. ID3 was a godsend. But then again, it was also a godsend when I got a 28.8 modem for my 486 66MHz, though I had to close all my windows in Windows 95 since the computer literally couldn't handle playing an Mp3. Simpler times, I guess. This was when Wing Commander II was very hot stuff.

Now that metadata has matured to the point where it is included in practically all file types, that information is being used to properly catalog, organize, and make sense of literally trillions of files. Some really cool stuff is being done with it.

Flickr organizes more than two billion images, and Facebook organizes four billion. Who knows what MySpace has. To put that into context, if you put those two billion Flickr photos into 200-photo, 1' wide folios, they'd stretch the same distance as a road trip from my home in Tucson to Milwaukee, or perhaps to Edmonton, Canada. For all of those sites put together, you're talking a third of the circumference of the planet.

Another site that's doing exciting with mass data collection is Last.fm, which collects data about the listening habits of many millions of people, though in my opinion they've not done as much as they could with the vast amount of data they've collected.

I mention all this because I've just posted the pictures I took at onto Flickr. I still have to tag and rate about 5,000 pictures in my archive, though of course I have no intention of posting all of them to Flickr.

I have already organized about 99% of my music collection, which primarily came from Maloney's when I was paid $2 an hour to organize their collection (of course, I also got to keep the collection, so it more than worked out for me). Unfortunately, Winamp really screwed me over in the data cataloging department: I'd been rating songs as I played them for about two years when it crashed (not being able to handle the 50,000 songs), and I lost the data. Rating music and pictures is tremendously handy when you have a lot of songs rated, because you can just pick a genre and minimum rating and hit "random." It's so wonderful because not only do you not have to DJ for yourself, but if you've been rating songs for a few years, you will hear songs you haven't heard in a long while.

I also still have many of my archived CDs to go through - and I guess if using Adobe Bridge is something I should do, I'll have to tag all those as well. I'm not convinced of its usefulness, though: I've had a system of directories going for quite a while now and even though I have about 90,000 (!) files in my photography, design, and music folders, I can find whatever I need in short order. So why bother tagging them all? Perhaps the best thing is to tag as I go, and figure that I'll have tagged anything I actually use over the course of, what, five years?

I keep telling myself that having all of this information organized will make me a bit more sane, and will make my general workflow faster. I suspect that the incredible amount of time it takes to organize all of it will take years to earn back in saved time later, but there's also an additional benefit of knowing it's all there. I've lost some good photos to trashed archive CDs, and hard drive failures. Ultimately, I justify all this work because of the peace of mind it brings me.

In any case, I'm very glad that I have a RAID configuration for my system with my new computer. I would just cry if I lost all this work I've done.

Labels: computers, games, information, mp3, music

posted by Steve @ 2:14 AM

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