Bill de hÓra argues that it is time to stop complaining about metadata and start using it. I agree, but note that all the success stories he notes use clever forms of social engineering to make it worthwhile creating the metadata in the first place. Cory's famous rant against metacrap was arguing against heavily engineered central systems that just assumed some poor smuck would create the metadata needed, and of course no one ever did. Typical of this type of system are those imposed by managers on employees for "tracking" without analysis of the overhead of using the system. Anyone who has used an inflexible problem logging system will know what I mean.