The Metadata Lifecycle for Digital Content

Classifying metadata values along a “content lifecycle” timeline is an interesting exercise that can make your DAM easier to use and maintain. Applying the categories Historical, Current and Future, you’ll find that each metadata value describes something related to the content’s origin or history, its current state or its future use.

The most immediate benefits that come from this metadata categorization are:

• It’s easier to ensure all required metadata (and nothing more) have been considered
• It’s easier to wrap a meaningful per-field rights model around your metadata fields, which enables you to better govern who can edit and see each value.

Applying the Metadata Timeline

Think of your metadata values as each falling somewhere on a timeline, with Historical values on the left, Current values in the middle and Future values on the right. This visual exercise enables you to spot any holes in your metadata schema, and it also illustrates where your timeline might be overstuffed with values that are redundant or beyond your needs. (Rule of thumb: If you can’t imagine ever searching for or reporting on a given metadata value, chances are you don’t need it.)

Below are examples of some common metadata values and where they fit along the metadata timeline.

Historical Metadata

Digital cameras can capture a suite of metadata that are part of the EXIF metadata standard. Among these values are date and time, camera model, shutter speed and other values that describe the state of the camera in use at the moment the photo was taken. Other content types come with their own set of Historical metadata values, such the date of an audio recording, the frame rate of a video capture or the author of a document.

Values like these mark the beginning of the content’s Historical metadata timeline and they must be protected to ensure their validity. In fact, it’s good policy to configure your DAM so that Historical metadata values cannot be casually (or erroneously) edited by users. This is an important distinction between Historical and Current metadata values.

In addition to the “carved in digital stone” metadata that should remain unchanged throughout the lifecycle of your content, you’ll periodically add values to Historical metadata to reflect the content’s lifecycle journey. Examples include:

• Licenses — To whom was the content licensed, and when
• Modifications — When were updates performed, and where are those older versions
• Approvals — Who granted approvals and when were they granted
• Distributions — Where was the content shared or sent, and when

As with the content’s original Historical values, these values should be changed only in the case of error. And those changes should always be in accordance with official DAM policy, which might include reviews, audits and journal entries outside the DAM itself.

Current metadata

Current metadata values describe the state of the content right now. Here you find your descriptive tags, production statuses, ownership, etc.

We think of Current metadata values as being subject to change as the content evolves, but it’s not uncommon for some Current metadata, such as the subject of a photo, to remain unchanged throughout the content’s lifecycle. Though it’s tempting to think of these static Current values as being Historical, it’s a good idea to keep them in your Current classification for one reason: they sometimes do change.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 3 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Snow White Helped Airbnb's Mobile Mission

To shape the future of Airbnb, CEO Brian Chesky borrowed a strategy from Disney animators.

By the time Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky returned to work after the holidays last year, his company had cornered a critical portion of the rental market and started an international expansion. Its executive team was planning the next big move. Should they campaign to put more homes on the Airbnb platform? Expand the peer-to-peer rental model to cars and office space? Chesky wasn't sure, but he knew how he wanted to talk about it.

Over his Christmas vacation, he had picked up a biography of Walt Disney. In it, he found an idea that would change the way Airbnb launched products and would eventually help steer Airbnb’s next move toward its mobile product.

“I realized that Disney as a company was actually at a similar stage where we are now when they created Snow White,” Chesky says. The company had success with shorter cartoons, but Walt wanted to create a feature-length film with enough depth that people would care about, not just laugh at, the characters. He wanted to tell a complete story.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began in the mid 1930s with a storyboard, a technique the animators at Disney had invented a few years earlier. A comic-book-like outline of the story helped all of the film’s collaborators understand the vision as they took on the new format. Chesky similarly wanted to use storyboarding as a way to understand the Airbnb customer experience as the company planned its next steps.

“Brian comes back from Christmas break with inspiration from Walt Disney and how he storyboarded everything from Snow White,” remembers Airbnb co-founder and chief of product Joe Gebbia, “and we kind of all are sitting around the conference table inspired, but wondering, what do we do next?”

Airbnb started the project, appropriately code-named "Snow White," by creating a list of the emotional moments that comprise an Airbnb stay. They built the most important of those moments into stories.

To make it an official storyboarding process, Airbnb hired Pixar animator Nick Sung to produce final copies of three stories: the host process, the guest process and the hiring process.

“When you have to storyboard something, the more realistic it is, the more decisions you have to make,” Chesky says. “Like are these hosts men or women? Are they young, are they old? Where do they live? The city or the countryside? Why are they hosting? Are they nervous? It’s not that they show up to the house. They show up to the house, how many bags do they have? How are they feeling? Are they tired? At that point you start designing for stuff for a very particular use case.”

The final storyboards document the Airbnb experience from different perspectives. In the host story, for instance, there's a moment when the characters think about what they could do with the extra income. In the guest story, there's a “moment of truth” when they arrive at the Airbnb space they've rented and immediately decide if doing so was a good idea. One of the storyboards begins with a character hearing about Airbnb for the first time at a cocktail party and ends with that character telling someone else about the service at a cocktail party.

To make it an official storyboarding process, Airbnb hired Pixar animator Nick Sung to produce final copies of three stories: the host process, the guest process, and the hiring process. The storyboards now hang prominently in its headquarters.

Chesky and Gebbia say the stories guide marketing, advertising, and customer service decisions at Airbnb as well as keep everyone working on the same page. But the unconventional brainstorming method also played an important role in answering the question about Airbnb’s next big move.

One of the first insights the team gained from thinking about their customers in narrative terms is that their service isn’t a website. Most of the Airbnb experience happens offline, in and around the homes it lists on that website.

“For us, it’s a dance between online and offline. And this has been our biggest challenge,” Gebbia says. “We saw it play out in the storyboard. We realized the key is mobile.... Mobile is that link between online and offline.”

Airbnb released its first mobile app more than a year before they started storyboarding. But mobile’s role in the business since has greatly increased. In January, the company released its first Android App and updated its mobile website to include new features such as instant chat between guests and hosts. In September, it announced that 26% of its traffic was coming from mobile devices. Last month Airbnb "acqhired" the mobile team behind restaurant review app Fondu because, says Gebbia, the team “knew how much more important mobile would be for us going forward.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Microsoft Announces End of Messenger With a Move to Skype

Questions over the future of a world where Messenger and Skype live side by side and are owned by the same company were finally resolved today. Microsoft has announced that it’s knocking Messenger on the head with Skype.

Skype Plans

In fairness this is not exactly unexpected. First because it paid US$ 8.5 billion last year for Skype and has to find something to do with it, and secondly, Microsoft has already hinted that it was going to get rid of Messenger at some point in the future.

What is surprising about the announcement, which appears on the Skype blog, is the speed at which it will happen.

Last month, Skype had indicated that it would be replacing Messenger, but didn’t at that point say when this would happen. In this announcement, it’s quite clear — Messenger will disappear in Q1 of next year and will be replaced with Skype — except in China where it is going to be kept on for a time anyway.

Skype and Messenger together

Microsoft also started testing Windows and Mac releases in beta that enabled users to sign in using their Messenger Live ID, send and receive messages, and then allowed them see who was on line in Messenger, all from Skype.

Skype With Messenger

But seems that’s all just the beta and in the blog post we get a much better idea of what Microsoft is going to do.

To the many questions that the integration poses, Microsoft has answers, although whether everyone thinks it is the “good news” that Microsoft claims it to be is another matter.

Upgrading to Skype

By the end of the first quarter next year, Skype users will be able to contact their Messenger contacts through Skype, and not just through instant messaging, but through voice and video too.

Basically, once the integration takes place, Messenger users will have to upgrade to Skype — that’s what the move to Skype is being described as — where they will find all their contacts already available.

And an upgrade is what it is. With it users will get:

• Better support for all platforms including iPad and Android tablets
• All the common features of both services combined into a single place
• Screen sharing
• Video calling between mobile phones
• Mobile and video calling to Facebook friends

The post also says that Skype will be offering information over the coming weeks to ensure a smooth migration.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com