Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web (shown right, Gore-ified), is complaining about how difficult it is to find what you want on the web. He brings up some points that ECM folks have known about for a long long time: metadata is essential for finding what you want. Timmay has been awarded a $350,000 grant to study the issue... like he needs the cash...

Anyway, I'm all over embedded metadata... but I can tell you right now its nearly impossible to get everybody in a small company to agree to a complex metadata standard, so good luck accomplishing that on the whole frigging internet... also, its even more impossible to get content creators to follow the metadata policies. People who work hard to create great content believe others should work hard to FIND their content.

Silly? Yes... but a very common attitude.

The ones who usually spend a lot of time optimizing their metadata and search results, are usually those with lower quality content, or people who are obsessed with their own popularity. Such as myself... Or, like spam blogs, aka splogs...

That being said, I wish Timmay well... but you don't need $350,000 to come up with a solution for this. I'd recommend creating a Microformat for embedded metadata, to apply to the content in the containing element... You'd also need some kind of cryptographically strong key for "trusted" metadata suppliers, so people don't try to tag porn sites with every metadata keyword in the universe. Also, the microformat needs to be extensible, so anybody can embed custom namespaces and keywords in it.

The Microformats folks have a tag similar to what he wants already, the rel-tag microformat. Its overly simple, but that simplicity will encourage adoption -- much in the same way that the "inferiority" of HTML over all other markup formats ensured its success. It looks like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">tech</a>

If this link is anywhere on the page, it signifies that the page has something to do with the metadata tag tech, and it gives Technorati as the home for the tag. I'd expand on this to allow for other tag homes, such as del.icio.us, or even any arbitrary social bookmarking site.

Done and done.

Naturally, you'd want to be more precise... some new sites have dozens of articles on the main page, and you'd like to tag each section individually... so this tag should only apply to the content in the containing tag. Also, this kind of formatting is difficult to embed in a Microsoft Word document: I couldn't get behind any kind of distributed metadata model unless it easily worked in multiple formats. A CSS style might be a better choice than the rel attribute in the link...

Finally, it needs some kind of authentication model... perhaps you need an authentication microformat somewhere on the page, and all microformats on the page inherit the credentials. Of course, you'd need to have some kind of tag to force exceptions, so banner ads from remote servers would need their own auth tokens.

Whaddya say, Timmay? Is that due-dilligence worth $5k?