ExpertExperience - Digital Asset Management Community

Meta "Cloudspotting"

I just returned from a trip to London with my 11-year old daughter. Once we got over our “Euro-shock” (the exchange rate is around $2 USD to the GBP right now!) we had a great time. We even managed to work in two business meetings about metadata (but I’ll save that story for another day.) There’s a wonderful new book out by the British author Gavin Pretor-Pinney titled The Cloudspotter’s Guide. I had wanted to buy the book for some time before I saw it at Foyles, London ’s premiere bookstore. So I happily purchased my very own Cloudspotter’s Guide to read on my return flight home to Virginia.

Video On Demand: Distribution is Key

15 years ago I remember taking one small step, though it seemed giant at the time. I downloaded a postage stamp sized black and white clip of the moon landing to my Windows 3.11 desktop which took up a good chunk of the 100 meg harddisk. 12 seconds of Neil's crackling transmission barely decipherable through the 2" PC speaker.  Today's G-search resulted in over 1m hits for NASA moon landing, whose video results whisked me off to a 2 minute full screen clip with crystal clear audio of the historic moment. (BTW, today NASA broadcasts 15 live feeds in 4 formats  here)

What is a taxonomy?

The first point in my list of taxonomy issues relates to the definition of taxonomy. Many people have a limited understanding of what a taxonomy is.  The following will illustrate the many ways a taxonomy can be represented and applied. 

We just ran one of our Taxonomy and Metadata Jumpstart calls - (a free four part series on taxonomy issues - you can write Patrick@earley.com for access to the archive of the call).  The first topic was "What is a taxonomy and why do you need one?".  Here is a summary of the "what is it" section: