Metadata is used in many applications and has potential in many more emerging areas but I am going to concentrate simply on ’search’ here. Those of us in the repository space will be familiar with the metadata vs text indexing argument and comparisons with Google.
This blog has been active for a few months now and it is interesting to examine how people are discovering it. There is no real surprise for me that the top referring source is our company website so at least some of that website’s navigation could be seen to be effective.
The second largest referring source is (again, no surprise) Google. However this is where things start to get interesting. The most popular search term from Google to this blog is ‘Youtube’. Given that I loosely comment on technology and its application in educational environments this is probably ok. However, the second most popular search term that people are finding their way to this blog is ‘how to braid hair’. Now one thing that this blog is not about is hairdressing however in one post I mentioned a site called viewdo which features community contributed videos on how to do things. In that article the words ‘french braid hair’ appears as an example of what you can see on viewdo.
So what does all this mean for me? Firstly, Google is indexing my blog which is a good thing. However, there appears to be no real context applied to the text that is being indexed. Using metadata, I can apply that context and would be very unlikely to have any metadata or tags mentioning braiding hair when describing the content in this blog.
Given that the blog is being indexed by generic search engines I need to be careful in my choice of words. The amount of times I have now mentioned braiding hair, the distance between occurrences of those words etc is probably going to result in this post being accessed by any number of aspiring hairdressers (that word is going to cause problems now too) and parents who may not have much interest at all in technology and education.
For those unfortunate enough to have been misdirected here, I hope they/you manage to read enough of the article to find out about viewdo and can ultimately find what you are looking for there. It’s a pity I don’t have any downstream analysis as I will never know whether they did or not.
By the way, Wii was the third most popular search term. At least I have an idea of what people are looking for.
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Postcript on this topic: Just out of interest I did a search on Google on ‘how to braid hair’ to see just how far down the list my original entry was. After 20 pages I gave up. This post appeared on the 13 page of search results though. Who in the world scrolls through that many pages?
The funniest part here is readng the title and comparing it to what you’ve learnt. Do you still believe that Metadata matters? You’ve certainly convinced me that it doesn’t. Except for aspiring hairdressers of course.
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