I just sent Christopher Lydon an email through his website, formally asking him to fill out the ID3 tags of the MP3s of his interviews. At least as of this writing, you can see my recent playlist full of his interviews with increasingly snarky comments in each as to the lack of those tags.
This is an important Internet notion that came up a lot in the recent Semantic Web debates – The Metadata is Important! MP3s present a rare opportunity to embed the metatdata inside the file itself in a convenient standardized form. Please use it, fine sir. Please use it, oh ye bands giving away MP3s to get attention. This info shows up automatically in the iPods of the world, makes indexing directories full of audio files work, makes dealing with the information overload better. It’s so little to ask for so much gain in information efficiency.
