The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Sean pointed me to the GLScube project a couple months ago. They are four Egyptians putting together a semantic file system for Linux. They have recently made the decision to rewrite their system following a 0.1 version release, and have also started a development blog, which should be interesting to follow. Their latest post, A Rant About Filesystems of Today, does a great job explaining the potential benefit of metadata for the average computer user. As they say, it’s all about usability.

What about Metadata? It is like they do not exist. Almost all of the most common file formats nowadays have Metadata that are left for the users to set. You know, this Author field in a PDF that is usually empty, and if not, probably has some cryptic irrelevant text. This is understandable of course, and users should not be blamed, because quite frankly my dear, Metadata means nothing. If they cannot organize based on it, or search with it, why would they spend the time to set it? And even more, why would they exercise the trouble in going through menus to edit them. Maybe, only a maybe, they would have set them if they were asked to in the Save dialogue of their application. But other than that, why spend the effort!?