Yesterday during a bit of rain my son was watching a Disney channel show I had DVR'd for him. Suddenly, during a commercial, he started giggling uncontrollably, and I couldn't for the life of me understand why. I asked what was funny, and he replied, "They said the 'Suite Life of Zach and Cody' would be coming up next." ??? "OK," I asked, "why is that funny?" "Because this isn't real, and it's not coming on next! They're so silly!" he answered. I tried to explain to him that the DVR wasn't really all that smart, it just recorded what was on at the time. Of course, I then had to wonder just how difficult it would be to have swapped out a time sensitive ad like that, using a little bit of metadata and some rules. It is possible. The entire experience would have been better.

Lots of people will spend countless hours building a taxonomy or ontology to categorize things. Some will put in the effort to build rules for their favorite search engine to classify content. Most will rely on pattern recognition. Rules are hard - but make content experience much better. The old adage still holds - you get out of something what you put into it. The real challenge here is the social engineering - the communicating between teams. In this example, between the networks and the cable television providers. There isn't even a question anymore of having things locked up in proprietary formats; the W3 have provided standards for these tasks.

So, how much work are you going to do today? Me, I'm going to work a little harder.