More on Simon's upcoming work with CIKTN

I wrote a couple of months back about year two of my stint as the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network's Metadata Champion. Here's a little interview with me the CIKTN filmed to provide a more detail, or at least to put a face to all the blog posts.

Meet The Team - Simon Hopkins from Creative Industries KTN on Vimeo.

More on Creativity, Money, Love

We've already posted our essay for the recently published anthology "Creativty, Money, Love". The publishers made a video to publicise the book, and Justin and I were asked to contribute. We touch briefly on the importance of showing off in education.

Looking back on a year as CI KTN Metadata bloke

This piece appears in the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network's document The Five Key Themes, to be published shortly. The document is a round-up of the work delivered by the KTN's "theme champions" over the course of the last year. Regular readers of this blog will known that I've been the TC for Metadata. What follows is my overview of the year - and the year or so ahead.

It's something of a given that people in the content industries (music, publishing, broadcast, film, games) don’t much like even the term content, let alone the word data. And metadata? What’s that got to do with creativity? Yet even the briefest of surveys of the UK's technology scene reveals a vast amount of highly creative thinking going on around metadata, and cutting edge, ground-breaking and potentially world-beating thinking at that.

Of course, we should have known this all along as the UK's track record is a strong one in this arena. In my own area of music, I look even now at Last.fm; the music fan in me sees a fantastically useful music recommendation and streaming service; the technology professional sees a quite brilliant feat of metadata wrangling.

It may be a truism that services offered by the web can be overwhelming, but it stands; who among us hasn't felt at least occasionally daunted by the web's riches? Now think about the power of music recommendations made by Last or the gig recommendations made by London start-up Songkick and imagine them applied to other areas of our lives, helping to filter the daily deluge. Increasingly intelligent feed readers and news aggregators are just the beginning. The big game is surely in the personalisation of all online and mobile content and services. And that's all about metadata.

But that's just on the consumer end of things. In the content production and distribution sphere, metadata is very much the new frontier; the kinds of asset identification and classification, production mark-up, usage tracking and archiving and auditing facilitated through the smart use of metadata are at once streamlining the production process and releasing more value from content re-use and re-purposing and a vastly better understanding of content's use and place "out in the world". And of course, the intelligent and detailed analysis of content's consumption better enables IP owners to get their stuff to the right audiences at the right time and at the right cost.

And the other creative industries? What value is there in metadata for fashion, say, or for architecture or for the performing arts? Well, for one thing, as the 'Internet of Things' becomes a reality, things themselves get ever closer to data, and information about those thing closer to metadata. So here's our upcoming challenge: how to take to lessons learned from the world of data in the virtual, digital world and apply them to the new tangible, very real world around us?

A brief report from the Feb 2011 Minibar event

Cross posted from the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network metadata blog.

Last Friday, 25 February, I attended the Minibar meet-up at the Truman Brewery in East London, a monthly networking event for people working in and around the digital media industries. I popped along to talk very briefly about the upcoming second round of the £10 million TSB metadata R&D funding, and to chat to anyone interested in it. But before the chatting started we were all treated to a handful of (strictly!) two-minute pitches from a variety of small companies in various stages of start-up. There was a metadata theme running through several of the presentations, and these caught my eye:

• Andrew Walkingshaw introduced us to Timetric, who specialise in the mining and analysis of economic and financial data for news reporting and who have worked with, among others, BBC News, The Financial Times, Mumsnet and The Guardian.
• Tom Adeyoola talked about Me-Tail, a nifty online tool which allows users to 'try on' clothes in online stores using innovative 3D modelling based on uploaded photographs.
• Aisha Yusaf presented Said.fm, a radio or, rather, audio aggregator which uses a combination of expert, editorialised curation and algorithmically-driven discovery to make personalised radio recommendations. Here's the thing, though: where so many services in this area are essentially music-based (as I write I'm enjoying the music blog-scraping Shuffler.fm), Said concentrates on speech audio.
• Finally, another team which have worked with The Guardian, Scraperwiki (sorry chaps, didn't catch your names) talked about how their product brought together screen-scraping technology with that of a wiki, enabling developers to share code and non-coders to recruit code help. (Really - just check the site for a rather more subtle explanation.)

A thoroughly engaging evening; I'm looking forward to the next one on 25 March, which you can sign up for on their Meetup page.

Video: On the importance of metadata to the Creative Industries

Simon Hopkins on Metadata in the Creative Industries from Creative Industries KTN on Vimeo.

I've been the Creative Industries Knowledge Network Transfer Metadata Champion for six months now (and yes made plenty of jokes about that title); much of what I've been doing in that time I've blogged here. But if you've ever wondered "so what?" and would like a two or three minute answer to that, here's a little video the CIKTN have just made of me discussing the importance of data and metadata for the survival and development of the creative sector.