I am grateful to my readers who keep me both honest and humble. Previously I wrote The importance of Metadata and I missed something critically important. The people who most need to improve their metadata don’t know what metadata is. Silly me.
When I write something tiny referencing someone else’s large work (video, podcast, web post), I use the Open Graph Protocol to grab the titles, summaries, citations, featured images, etc.
When I paste a link into our Open Graph enabled submission system, sometimes it “just works” and I can start typing.
Otherwise, I have to cut and paste some or all of the pieces. I often have to download, upload and re-encode the picture or find a replacement picture.
If I am writing only a paragraph or two, these logistics tasks can take much more time than the writing itself and are never fun.
There are other types of metadata, but this is my specific issue.
If you are creating content that you desire to be shared, it’s worth configuring your content management tool to make this easy for those of us that would like to share your content. If your tool can’t do this, you should probably replace it.
