Music and social media
The cost is therefore enormous in the time taken to prepare a database to contain all the information necessary to perform similarity-based search. In this case, it would take approximately 50 person-years to enter the metadata for one million tracks.
Social media web services address the limitations of centralized metadata by opening the task of describing content to public communities of users and leveraging the power of groups to exchange information about content.
This is the hallmark of Web 2.0. With millions of users of portals such as MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, group behavior means that users naturally gravitate towards those parts of the portal categories or groups with which they share an affinity; so they are likely to find items of interest indexed by users with similar tastes.
However, the activity on social networking portals is not uniform across the interests of society and culture at large, being predominantly occupied by technologically sophisticated users, therefore social media is essentially a type of editorial
metadata process.
