That settles it! Other things it is.
Ok Deane, let me try this.
Say we invoke a radio station. Call it KABC. We then have the station, it's staff, listeners, and physical things, buildings, tower and such.
Say that KABC runs a call in talk show, with our host Bob Blowhard.
If Bob were to start a discussion about daily events on his show, that would be a KABC hosted discussion. Not meta-discussion.
If Bob were to talk about up-coming changes in how his show works, or KABC decided to talk about program changes, engineering changes or whatever, those would be usually characterized as announcements.
Where we have the Internet, those kinds of things often end up as full on discussions, just because of how the tech works. A radio analogy would be an announcement, followed by a nice segment on the BB show where people could call in and talk about that stuff.
With me so far?
In computers there is the concept of data. Data exists on the machine and over time it ends up being talked about, organized, filtered, and such.
This activity actually results in more data about the data that is the point of discussion!
This is meta-data. (and is actually a large part of what I do for a living)
Many Internet discussion boards early on were largely inhabited by geeks and nerds. After all, they built the things first, then everybody else came to the party and here we are today.
The term "meta" and the concept associated with it grew to be accepted not as a prefix, but as a stand alone word associated with self-interest discussion in the same way that data about data is meta data, discussion about the discussion is meta-discussion, or just meta.
Does that make sense?
When I then ask, "Can we use this for meta?", the obvious context is PDXRadio because we are here, not somewhere else.
UGH...
Posted on June 19, 2009 - 12:38 PM
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