discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

Cory Nelson wrote:
> I propose sites under a CC license include a meta tag in their header saying
> so.  Though this won't help people recognize the content as being under a CC
> license, it could help search engines greatly.
>
> Here is an example:
>
> <meta name="license"
> content="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/"; />
>
> What do you guys think?

It would help search engines a little bit -- looking for a meta tag is 
slightly easier than looking for embedded RDF, though the latter is not 
at all difficult, as demonstrated by Nathan Yergler's ccValidator and 
mozCC (see <http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3922> for links).

However, HTML META has at least three disadvantages, from least to most 
important:

* None of the existing ~1 million pages with a CC license use that 
format. (I don't consider that a huge disadvantage, as the current set 
of CC licensed content will be a tiny fraction of the set that will 
exist in say another year, if we're at all successful.)

* RDF is far more expressive.  For example, without introducing 
secondary encoding for HTML META keys or values, you couldn't add 
metadata concerning anything other than the current document.

* Requiring metadata placed in the HEAD of an HTML page will 
dramatically decrease metadata adoption.  The only reason so much CC 
metadata is out there now is that including it is a zero-cost operation. 
 When the user selects a license and copies&pastes the HTML with a 
license statement and button into their web page, they get the embedded 
RDF without having to know anything about it.  Getting people to take 
extra steps to include or produce metadata is very hard, perhaps futile. 
  I tend to believe that good metadata must either be a side effect of 
some other process (e.g., selecting a license) or a collaborative effort 
by an interested community (e.g., Amazon book reviews, Bitzi, DMoz, 
MusicBrainz) (leaving out the case of $$$ for knowledge workers).

However, I welcome further ideas and discussion...

Thanks,
Mike

p.s. You should consider adding support for 
<http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule> to your C# RSS 
2.0 library <http://int64.org/viewcode.php?id=11>. :-)

--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21