Today I saw something that made me think about all the hype around meta-data and how they're changing the data landscape in online media. I have often wondered about EPG writers for years and today saw a description egregious enough to actually want to talk about it. For those few of you not aware, an EPG is an electronic program guide and it's the interactive channel and show description screen you can bring up on your cable box that has essentially made TV Guide redundant in just a few short years. Every so often I'll bring up the description of a show and burst into laughter at the rather unique take of some unknown writer.

Today I saw one of my favorites. I do understand that the Predator movies may not be everybody's cup of tea but may it never be said that the Predator (an alien hunter from another planet, came to Earth to go on safari - for humans), is anything but a well acknowledged cult-film bad ass. Someone disagreed:

"Predator 2: TV 14: 2 stars: Made 1990: L.A Police hunt a sneaky alien creature in 1997"

Sneaky alien creature? Here's what a Predator looks like. Enough said about "sneaky" as a descriptive term.

So what this makes clear is that this movie was certainly not seen or even particularly well explained to the writer aforementioned. In essence the description here is built for consumers but also represents meta-tagging of this particular piece of content as well. So how does this tie into some of the aspects of meta-driven advertising we're beginning to hear about?

Tagging represents the tip of the iceberg for content-providers. Effective tagging of its content across any medium/screen/format allows them to build any number of targeting models depending on the comprehensiveness, the accuracy and the structure of the meta-tagging model.

However, the effectiveness of this tagging goes down tremendously, if they are not truly representative of the content to which they are linked. So what this ridiculous EPG "tag" makes me ask is - who is doing our tagging and how effectively are we doing it? So much of the future of interactive media will be built around these intangible meta-models, I hope that it's being built with scientific rather than media discipline.  

In our industry, I've had ample opportunity to see what wildly differing attitudes content-providers have taken concerning the integrity and accuracy of their meta-data. There is no question that the more complex the technology and its reliance on accurate data, the more companies will feel the burn to provide powerful, accurate meta-data and the rise of the semantic web and  natural language processing  should certainly bring it even more to the fore.

Here's to the Predator (2) getting the kick ass description he deserves.