links for 2011-01-25

"Metadata is the first line of defense in the signal-to-noise ratio. Given that this ratio is only going to increase over time, there's a huge role for metadata to play". Very interesting interview with Laura Dawson about doing the metadata production for ebooks alongside the physical publishing workflow

Turns out if you ask people why they did an embarrassing thing, they are pretty sheepish about it.

"I especially love the fact that our random misogynist could hide under the +5 Invisibility Cloak of White Geek at Tech Conference, emboldened by his +3 Shield of Imbibed Pints". I am increasingly ashamed of the behaviour of men at tech conferences. WTF is wrong with them?

Janine Gibson and Jonothan Moore talking all things iPad at Guardian towers

Unfortunately this clashes with the next London IA event, otherwise I think I would be there

Excellent blog post about the design challenges on reworking h2g2, and how to bring the community along with you. Just a shame you hit the 'Next...' button to see the next post on this blog, and it talks about the 'disposal' of h2g2...

Paul Murphy puts together a Storify page about the 'disposal' of h2g2

Genuinely, genuinely, genuinely have no idea who benefits from scrubbing sites like Politics 97 off the BBC servers. Surely costs more to delete than to leave them on the disk.

Basically this is the blog post I was going to write this week about the BBC Online changes, and someone has done it for me. All hail the lazyweb!