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Metadata isn't boring (I promise)

May 23, 3:59 p.m. | OpenWeb

Adobe is watching you. Maybe not you in particular, but someone like you. That’s what Ginna Baldassarre, project manager of the Production Premium Creative Suite package told me and the rest of the RJI Interaction Desgin contest winners during a presentation at Adobe’s San Francisco office last week. Specifically, they’re watching the average user’s workflow. CS is something I’ve used for years, before it was even called that. I learned Photoshop on version seven; my high school newspaper was created in InDesign 2.

One of the first things I found about using Adobe’s software is that the narrow feature set I was using was part of a much broader spectrum of uses for the software. As CS became more popular, even Adobe realized that people were using their products for entirely different things than they were originally designed for. Case in point: Photoshop now has 3D animation features. Flash, which now serves a large majority of the video on the web, didn’t even have its own video codec within the player until version six. With an almost infinite number of use cases out there, everyone has been figuring out their own particular way to manage the way they work.

I find that a lot of people are married to their workflow. Or lack thereof. My photos are all over the place on my hard drives, and the only way I can ever find them is to search by date, usually going through about a week’s worth of photos before I find what I’m looking for. I’ve tried to use Bridge, Photo Mechanic, even just batch renaming images to get rid of the default filenames. I never stick to anything.

But, when I write code, everything’s different. I have all of my projects stored in the Sites directory of my Mac. I can easily navigate to a folder named “img” and expect to find images I’m using for my site. Same with CSS. The reason for this is convenience. When I’m writing code, if everything’s in the same place, the code becomes infinitely more portable and easier to write. There’s a tangible benefit to refining my workflow, because it influences the work itself.

This is why Adobe wants to look over your shoulder. The web has changed in the last few years to the point where the organization of data is often more important than the data itself. Twitter would not be nearly as successful without an API to access it from your smartphone. Google Reader would be worthless without the organization of data into RSS feeds. From the demonstrations I saw, Adobe seems to be focusing not only on streamline a user’s workflow, but providing incentives for users to adopt smarter ways of working. And that means metadata.

Metadata makes journalists lives easier. As we move into a more multimedia-centric world, there are fewer stories that are told entirely through text. Broadcasters, newspapers and radio stations all have a vast archive of stories that can’t be easily read by the code that makes up webapps and search engines. The integration between Adobe’s Story and Premiere represents one of the more interesting ways of gathering this data. Scenes are described in Story and any characters, (or in journalists’ case, sources) notes or dialogue are tied to that scene. When the footage has been shot, you can associate that file with the scene, keeping the metadata and the video itself together. You can even use Premiere to transcribe the audio. Not only can you then look up what sources have been in what pieces, but you can also allow your users to do the same online.

Say there’s a seemingly unknown citizen suddenly announcing his or her candidacy for mayor. Maybe a TV station’s reporters interviewed the person a few years back as a source on a completely separate story. If users could access this video through searches on the metadata, stations would likely see a huge increase in engagement, as older news could be queued up instantly as it becomes relevant to a user. It’s the Wikipedia phenomenon: One story leads to another, which leads to another and suddenly you’ve spent an hour on the site and you’re reading something with almost no relation to what you came there for. The viewer is more educated, and the site gets more impressions for ads.

That’s not even scratching the surface of what metadata can do. If an independent site wants to aggregate news to compare all the mayoral candidates’ positions, that metadata can be used to return relevant stories from the news outlet. The site could use an algorithm to search the transcript stored in the metadata and use key phrases to determine his or her position on an issue. So, from what might have been a view-and-forget story comes this whole new ecosystem of data and information.

If news organizations embrace a workflow that leads to the creation of more relevant metadata, they might discover a whole new world of relevance. Why rely on Google News to aggregate stories when a paper or TV station can work with other partners to provide much more relevant and long-lasting content through access to this type of information? Of course, this would have to be done through some sort of open API (which is an entirely different post for another day), but having the information is the first step in something much bigger. Adobe isn’t just helping you by providing better workflow tools; they’re helping the Internet as a whole. Journalists get paid, developers get data and the world is a better place. And maybe I’ll eventually be able to find my photos.

As always, I’d love comments. What’s your workflow? Does it involve metadata? Does the open web frighten and intimidate you? Posting is easy! Just click on the comments link below.