Metadata, the real heart and soul of Vista and beyond…
I’m going to say it now. Mark my words. Vista and beyond, what’s going to make and break it for people is the ease with which metadata is assigned to their files and work.
Why am I throwing this idea out into the open now? Well, I just finished indexing my 30,000th file through Windows Media Information Services (WMIS) to get metadata into my MP3’s and WMA’s via WMP. It wasn’t the easiest experience to say the least. I’m not even halfway done.
Oh and I haven’t even started putting lyrics data into the tracks either. That’s a process that’s just too daunting to even begin at this point.
I’ve got over 30,000 photos as well that are totally void of metadata. The only thing they have going for them is that they’re in some sort of decent folder structure and still have the emedded EXIF data from my Canon 20D. Other than that they lack any details about the people in the photos, the location of the photos, the objects in the photos, or any other information one would hope to have.
So with the way we interact with digital media going into Vista and beyond totally changing there’s a real need to improve the way we interact with and really start using metadata. Things are changing a bit inside Microsoft that’s for sure. If you’re in any way involved with building software for digital media now would be a darn good time to investigate what Microsoft is doing moving forward and start adopting some of the same practices and developing some new practices of your own to take advantage of the metadata boom in the next three to five years.
But hey, who am I? Well I’m just ahead of the average consumer by a couple years and I’m already asking for things to improve…
