Note to Publishers: More Metadata Please

Ian Kennedy pointed me towards Alacra alum Jake Harris' post on metadata and article tagging at the New York Times. Jake highlights the extensive tagging that now accompanies an online NY Times article. But Jake points out:

For all its usefulness, the New York Times metadata seems remarkably underutilized by people out there. Perhaps because many of our competitors do not share their metadata, third-party aggregators like Google News and Daylife stick to using just the content of the article to guess the subjects of the stories.

Worse than not sharing, many other sources of news (and other information) don't tag their content at all.  On Alacra Premium and the Alacra Store there's a high correlation between the quantity and quality of the metadata and the revenue we generate from a given content source.  Knowledge intensive customers subscribe to Factiva and LexisNexis for the consistent tagging as well as the overall aggregation.  At this point, tagging content is not a luxury - it's an absolute necessity.  And the greater the investment a publisher makes in metadata the greater the returns.