Content : Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

Author:Cory Doctorow [Doctorow, Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collections
Publisher: http://c3jemx2ube5v5zpg.onion
Published: 2008-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

2.3 People are stupid

Even when there's a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata creation.

Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for “plam” on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for “Plam Pilots.” Misspelled listings don't show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay.

The fine (and gross) points of literacy – spelling, punctuation, grammar – elude the vast majority of the Internet's users. To believe that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and punctuate – let alone accurately categorize their information according to whatever hierarchy they're supposed to be using – is self-delusion of the first water.

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