I was thumbing through an Italian newspaper in my morning hunt for cognates when I realized that while the information in the paper is noise to me, I am fluent in the metadata. I know that this is a headline, that is an ad, this is a caption, that is a pointer to the page on which the article is continued, this is a table of contents, that is a byline.

Of course that’s predictable: The information in the paper is primarily linguistic while the metadata is typographic and positional. Nevertheless, my fluency in metadata extends to every newspaper in every language I’ve ever seen, from Chinese to Twi. Metadata: The new Esperanto. [Technorati tag: metadata]

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