"The Million Song Dataset is a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks." It's about 288 GB but you can download a smaller subset of 10,000 songs selected at random to get a taste. Curious what you'll get? Check out this example track description. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn on Oct 2, 2011 - 27 comments

"Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke)." —Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg on Google's little metadata problem.
posted by Toekneesan on Sep 1, 2009 - 29 comments

Recently we've all been thinking about flat (or better, faceted) hierarchy web apps that organize email, photos, bookmarks, and general knowledge. The common threads are metadata (tags, categories, labels) that enrich relationships within and hence searchability of large collections. But besides marketroid hype (buzzwords, snark) and a computer that plays Twenty Questions what else can we do and study using faceted data structures: searchable culture references in The Simpsons, library science, computer filesystems, A.I. development, models for human memory and cognition?
posted by fatllama on Dec 5, 2004 - 46 comments

anti-thesaurus
unhappy with web users who are unnecessarily drawn to your site in the pursuit of non-existent content? does it bog down your bandwidth? solution? write a metadata tag that specifically excludes certain terms from search engine hits by the simply defining them as non-words.
posted by bwg on Dec 2, 2001 - 10 comments

Flyswat is a crazy new app that adds metadata to any page you're viewing on the web. When you click on the newly hyperlinked words, it shows a popup with extra info about the word. Here's this site, Slashdot, and prolific.org screenshots (notice it actually recognized "0sil8" as a word). I also thought it was kind of funny it uses the same link colors as this site for it's hyperlinks. If you thought weblogs were a huge time sink, just imagine when every page you see has all sorts of offsite related links...
posted by mathowie on Jan 31, 2000 - 3 comments