[Sigia-l] Corporate Blogging - the problems

[Eric Scheid]

On 12/9/03 2:43 PM, "Listera" <listera at rcn.com> wrote:

> [...] problematic. As is the notion that bloggers should be compelled to
> categorize prior to publishing.

I'm a bit perturbed by this. Just imagine if society takes the same
don't-care not-my-problem attitude to other things ...

* food scraps will be simply tossed to the floor, the dogs will clean up
* children have to support themselves through labour in the mines
* that round receptacle under your office desk doesn't exist, it all gets
  tossed on the floor, as does all your important papers because you no
  longer have a filing cabinet either
* doctors wear their blood stained blouses with pride, and don't wash up
* books no longer have page numbers, table of contents, or indexes
* *all* computer files get names like "untitled 1", "untitled 2",
  and "alkjfsdlkfj", and dumped into just one folder

and so on... 

As new technology enters society, society doth change. Sometimes slowly, and
sometimes under great protest, but it does change none the less, for it's
own good.

Now that we are entering the information age, perhaps society should be
encouraged to adopt some new hygiene practices regarding the looming
mountain of excretia?

Just asking, that's all.

On a more practical note ... what can we do as designers to make it easy, to
the point of it being second nature, to incorporate meta data into content
creation? How can we shape our products so as to encourage or reward good
information hygiene? Is there perhaps some "tough love" actions we could
take? (I'm reminded of Apple removing the cursor keys for the first Mac, so
as to encourage adoption of that new user input control device, the mouse).

e.