IMPORTANT NOTE: I published this blog post back in March 2014, and it received such good feedback for being funny but informative, that I thought it deserved republishing. Please note that it is an outlandish subject and it should be taken with the sense of humour it was intended with. It is also perhaps Not Safe For Work so please before reading any further consider where and what you are reading from but otherwise, Enjoy. Emily.
Metadata of Porn.
I once wrote on Twitter that I had fulfilled my job by teaching my housemate what metadata was. To clarify; my housemate is a bouncer, (sorry, Door Technician), and has no interest in or knowledge of Records Management (RM) at all. We’ve been house sharing for 18 months and most things I tend to babble at him go right over his head but I finally got something about RM to sink in. How did I do it, I hear you ask? I used the example of porn. Yes, Porn.
For those not in the know and are mostly reading this because they saw the porn tag; What is meta data?
metadata
noun
1.a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.
A colleague in IT once said to me that if you could crack the dark art of metadata and search engine optimisation, you could earn bucket loads. I’m geeky but not THAT geeky.
So for those people who currently, or have at some time, held their beds up with 4ft high stacks of porn magazines, this does not apply to you. This is for the 21st century folk, who have sectioned off part of their hard drive and password protected it with some kind of obscure password, preferably something a little more complex than 1234.
Without metadata you will find yourself searching through your hoards of porn for hours trying to find the right video to “do the trick” in your onanistic activity.
When you have so much porn, the titles of each video will blur into a mix of names doing a location. Without metadata, you might just miss your opportunity.
I am not responsible for any external web links that you choose to investigate from this blog post however, should you choose to mosey on to a porn site and confirm you are indeed over 18 (age not maturity), you get the opportunity to use the search box. Each of the videos you are confronted with has metadata attached, so that when you use that search function, it can retrieve videos back for your entertainment.
So when you search; MILF, GILF, secretary, maid, babysitter, gay, bisexual, threesome, gang bang, outdoor, indoor, office, pool, spa, transsexual, pan sexual, transgender, swingers, vanilla, BDSM, kinky, and so on and so forth, it brings back a selection of videos that are associated with those words i.e. metadata.
(Please note, should some of the above keywords not work, it’s because there is no video file with that piece of metadata attached. I haven’t personally tried them all out…)
Now if you tried to implement this search in the same way on your computer storage like ‘my documents’ or an external hard drive, it’s unlikely you will be able to specify a similar amount of metadata to search on as default Windows or Mac file information is far too basic for you to be able to do so.
The best data you will get is automatically generated metadata such as the below:
Name: Two Girls One Cup.
Kind: protected MPEG-4 movie (.m4v)
Size: 312.5 MB
Created: 14th February 2014
Modified: 15th February 2014
Last Opened: 14th March 2014
Dimensions: 640 x 480
Duration: 0:01
Porn sites are obviously not the only websites with search boxes. Any and every piece of content or record you want to be searchable whether it be on the internet or on your own private device, will need to add some metadata manually. So, if you want Google to find your internet blog, you need to be applying a type of metadata known as tags to your blog that describes what it’s about because Google Spiders crawl the internet on a regular basis looking for metadata to update their search results. The more accurate and specific metadata you have the more likely it will return on page 1 of the search results. If you don’t add meta data you may as well dump your document/blog/item in a large black bin.
Even Twitter has jumped on the metadata bandwagon by having the hashtag. It’s a searchable field that describes what ‘something else’ i.e. your tweet subject. Like anything, people mess up metadata and create very odd tags that reduces the chance of the content being seen by anyone but their followers. So whilst hashtags can be funny, metadata standards are better.
Now, seeing as you cannot use default file information to provide the sort of helpful details you need to search for, what would be the next best thing? Now I don’t advocate taking your porn into work to use in your sparkly EDRMS… that might just get you the sack…but if you worked for one of the porn hosting companies, …you’d be likely to find that the information you want to add is already defined according to an agreed set of classifications. In the Open Text environment (not a double entendre!) this information is generally known as “attributes”..
The problem you have with metadata is that nobody finds the time to fill them out, unless you force them and make the fields mandatory.
The more fields you make mandatory the longer it will take you to save your videos, the more unpopular EDRMS becomes and equally the more stress you put on your network when searching. If you have too many mandatory fields you will also find yourself typing letters in the fields just to get past the mandatory stage of filling out, so this function needs to be reviewed on regular basis to maintain its integrity, authenticity and reliability.
However, the more fields you have filled out manually, the easier it will be to find your porn right down to being able to search on the producer, the director, the actress’, the actors’, the length of the video, the type, the language, the year of production, and so on and so forth. You could even create your own fields that holds bra size if you so desired! Obviously you cannot make the bra size a mandatory field because what happens if there are no brassieres in the porn video that you have?
Finding that balancing art between ‘easier to find’ versus ‘time to fill out’ is a very hard one to decide on. In any organisation this decision is one best made by consulting the senior management for buy in because at the end of the day its them that have to promote it and if they wouldn’t spend the time filling the fields out, why would anyone else? Just don’t forget to sell the idea to your front-line staff. Use the carrot not the stick!
So yes, don’t really ask your Senior Management how much metadata you should put on your porn in their reaaaaally expensive EDRMS system; not only will that cause many strange looks, the system has auditing capability of knowing when you put it in; how much you’ve put in; how often you looked at it; how long you were looking at it; what times you’ve looked at it; what security permissions you have on it and many many other reporting methods; not to mention all that metadata you’ve attached to it… So whilst you keep your porn well away from work perhaps you might consider how important metadata is and how much it makes your life easier in the long run. When you have meta data, the world is your oyster.
#tagthatporn
The views, opinions and advice within this blog post are not on behalf of any organisation but that of her own persona and business as RMGirl. Emily can be contacted on emily@rmgirl.co.uk or via twitter on @rmgirluk