The Meta Wars
For all that people are saying 2006 is going to be the year of this or that, I think that 2006 is going to be the year of metadata, and as such, we're about to see some of the bloodiest battles in blogging. She who controls the metadata rules the world …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece drops mid-fight rather than at its start: back in October, blog news services were already fighting it out over which aggregators would decide what the blogosphere reads, and Burningbird names the underlying prize — the metadata layer that feeds them. The same-day syndicated pickup on Get Real sharpens the frame as 'Structured Blogging versus Messy, Messy, Messy,' i.e., formal machine-readable schemas versus freeform folksonomy tags.
The stakes as the author frames them are distributional: whoever controls how posts describe themselves controls how they get found, ranked, and reused. That makes this less a technical standards squabble than a bid for the chokepoint position in blog discovery going into 2006.
First-order effects
- Blog toolmakers and platform owners face an immediate fork: adopt structured-blogging-style schemas or lean on messy user tagging — and whichever they choose decides whether their output flows cleanly through third-party aggregators.
- Blog news and search services become dependent parties in the war: their rankings and feeds are only as good as the metadata format that wins publisher adoption.
Second-order effects
- Aggregators and news services are pushed to compete on metadata handling rather than raw index size — an escalation of the service-versus-service fight already underway since October.
- Tool vendors gain leverage over publishers: support for one metadata camp or the other effectively picks winners among the services downstream, turning format choice into a distribution deal.
Third-order effects
- If one camp consolidates control of the metadata layer, gatekeeping over blog discovery shifts from hosting platforms to whoever indexes and structures the content — a structural dependency that outlives any single format war.
- A durable split risks emerging in the blogosphere itself between machine-legible structured publishing and unstructured personal writing, with discoverability — and therefore audience — diverging along that line.
The trend: Web publishing is entering a phase where the real contest is over the metadata layer beneath content, because controlling how posts describe themselves means controlling how they get found.