I consider myself a metadata geek. I write about it, I work for a company that helps manage it, I track and play with the related standards, and I have a network of friends who fall into several of these categories.

A few years ago, as a tourist in a touristy part of Rome a bit east of the Pantheon, I was losing faith in my wife’s directional sense and asked her for the map. As I walked along and tried to read it through my prescription sunglasses, I couldn’t make out the street names. The print was too tiny. Or—and I really didn’t like this scenario—I was finally old enough that I was having trouble seeing small print.

I keep a file of notes for ideas for potential postings in this weblog. Here are the notes for one idea:

I try not to forward people spam that strikes me as funny because of its strange, autogenerated content (“Look! Andre Breton-surrealist-beatnik-acid-poetry!”) because there’s so much of it out there that there’s nothing special about any of it. (Please, no counter-examples.) When one such message got through my spam filters to appear in my inbox with a subject header of “One namespace to rule them all”, though, it certainly pushed a lot of buttons in the mind…

You’ve probably heard that Yahoo has this new, drag-and-drop tool to easily combine and manipulate RSS and Atom feeds. (Forgive me for omitting the exclamation point from their name—speaking of which, shouldn’t the logo for yahoo.es be “¡Yahoo!”?) Tim O’Reilly called Yahoo pipes no less than “a milestone in the history of the internet.” Early reports mentioned load problems, and I was extra busy with work, so I waited a bit before trying it.

Some of us geeky types play with certain technologies just because they’re fun and useful to us and to our friends in the little clubs that form around each technology. We debate about their potential use to a wider audience, and there’s certainly been plenty of this debate about the semantic web.

After I wrote recently about tweaking a Movable Type template so that RDFa metadata would be automatically generated with the individual archive versions of each weblog posting, Ben Adida suggested that it would be better if I had added the markup inline with the weblog entry instead of grouping it into a single block in the web page’s head element.

Last Saturday morning, before getting on a plane from Frankfurt to Charlotte, North Carolina with a book that I knew wouldn’t last that far, I went into a newsstand to find a big, glossy, British Formula One magazine to supplement my reading. I didn’t find one, but I bought something else glossy and British: a special New Year edition of The Economist called “The World in 2007” with summaries of where various countries and industries are now and where they may go in the…