Metadata is for the birds

David Weinberger, writing from the TTI-Vanguard conference last week, notes Joho the Blog: [tti] Morning

Ian Black of Autonomy says that the Autonomy project head at Ford's training department says "Metadata is for the birds" because his department generates 5 million new objects per month, too much for manual tagging. Autonomy wants to provide systems that push info to users without requiring them to interact with it beforehand.

I've been hearing this more and more, and I am beginning to see the importance of what is behind it.  With the Ford example a requirement that adds any time to the process is going to get burdensome VERY quickly.  No matter what people say, adding manual metadata isn't easy, yet this is where document management and content management projects spend so much time.  (I've been there.) 

A commenter complains that people conflate all metadata with the manual entered terms, since many systems automatically collect time, date, file size, user id and other metadata.