Distributed Metadata
Vanderwal points to Structured Content: What's in it for Writers?. Key insight: "Very few people are willing to change the way they work in order to make somebody else's life easier."
A similar question for metadata: what's in it for writers/indexers? I believe this is one of the unsolved issues in the whole metadata field. The answer tool-vendors give is: "The machines will do the work". I don't think so. The machines can assist the work of humans, but there is a deep reason why people should do metadata work: without actually working with categories (ie. if you have them generated), you won't understand/internalize them. The best categories are the ones you create yourself - they are structured the way you work/think. People do index stuff for themselves, but you can only impose limited structure upon that indexing because everyone sees the world differently. So the challenge becomes: how do we use people's personal indexing so that it becomes usable by others as well? How do we tie in bottom up structuring with top down? The distributed metadata approach has potential there. Unproven potential, but as the saying goes, there's hoping.