David Weinberger interview with Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow's acidly written 2001 Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia, is worth revisiting. The seven straw men being:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission: Impossible - know thyself
5. Schemas aren't neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There's more than one way to describe something

For an update I came across this 1/5/2007 interview with Corry Doctorow by David Weinberger, whose newly published book Everything is Miscellaneous I am reading. There is a full transcript of the interview available from the URL. The section in the interview on implicit metadata is interesting. Here is an excerpt:

"I think that the big difference between Google's implicit inspection of the Internet structure and a folksonomy is that Google only works well when you are implicit.  As soon as you get explicit with Google, it starts to break.  So, search engine optimizers, or link spammers, link farmers, Google bombers, and so on, they all seek to subvert Google by explicitly creating links for Google to find and index.  It's really only the people who naively create links between pages without thinking whether or not Google will index them that produce useful material for Google.  Google goes to some lengths to try and figure out who's making links for its benefit and throw those links away so that it's only examining those accidental links."