Mr. Rod Welch
rodwelch@pacbell.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
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Subject:
Metadata Organizes Email Information into
Dear Rod,
This article is about a program that helps sort email and how it could be
done better.
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The interesting part to us is near the end where Udell talks about the
problems of adding metadata easily in the process of producing content.
At InfoWorld's recent Web services conference, Google's cofounder Sergey Brin
gave a keynote talk. Afterward, somebody asked him to weigh in on RDF and the
semantic Web. "Look," he said, "putting angle brackets around everything is not
a technology, by itself. I'd rather make progress by having computers
understand what humans write, than to force humans to write in ways computers
can understand." I've always thought that we need to find more and better ways
to capture metadata when we communicate. But I've got to admit that the
filtering and folders I use in Outlook require more effort than most people
will ever be willing to invest. There may yet turn out to be ways to make
writing the semantic Web easy and natural. Meanwhile, Google and, now, ZOCB
remind us that we can still add plenty of value to the poorly-structured stuff
that we write every day. It's a brute-force strategy, to be sure, but isn't
that why we have these 2GHz personal computers?
.. Thanks,