UNO UPDATE: New World Order News Digest

Chaos Is The New World Order

In what Weinberger calls "the new digital disorder," the sonnet gets thrown into a vat somewhere on the Web. But not before it's tagged with "metadata," which is nothing more than information about information. The sonnet might be labeled with "Shakespeare," and "English poetry." It might also be tagged with "that poem that Jane likes." And "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

And, for good measure, the rest of the poem's text, and every misspelling of Shakespeare, and every possible association anyone has ever had with summer's days and buds of May. The result is a messy clump of metadata that dwarfs the data in the poem itself. And the more metadata, the more likely that Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) will bring a user to his or her target within milliseconds of clicking "I Feel Lucky."
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