A few years back, when “metadata†was still something of a buzzword, I always felt I lost a portion of my audience whenever the word came up in a presentation. Then I figured out a surefire way to explain the value of metadata to an audience of college students—the CDDB system:
“When you put that CD in the drive to rip your favorite tunes, isn’t it great the way the artist, title, album name, song time, and all that information just appears in your ripping tool window? You don’t have to type it in and when you go to Napster to find another song, most everyone will have used the same information which cuts down on versions you have to wade through.”
The audience seemed to instantly understand the value of having good “data about the data.”
Now I have new example to use to illustrate the use of metadata in everyday life. The NSA isn’t spying on private telephone conversations—it’s merely processing the metadata provided by AT&T.
Let me take this opportunity to suggest a recent podcast from Open Source, a radio show hosted by Christopher Lydon (airdate: May 11, 2006).  I just listened to it during lunch today and found the comments by author William Gibson (Neuromancer) particularly interesting. You may know Gibson from his writings or the quote often attributed to him: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Gibson: “I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some…“