The perfect case in point is that of metadata. There’s a word you hear a lot on the web. It means the data about the data – the author’s name, the date it was written, and so on. In its purest and perfect sense, any story has an infinite amount of metadata: this piece you’re reading now was written by me, on my macbook air, on the 29th December 2009, in London, in part in Whitehall, in part in the Milk Bar, Soho, and in part in my office in Notting Hill, this paragraph being written with an ambient temperature of about 20 degrees c, while the local weather was cold and rainy, etc etc etc. It concerns electronic publishing, and refers to…and is classified as…and is linked to…and is part of a collection called…and is built on thinking done in…

You can go on and on.

The problem is that metadata is incredibly fragile. If you don’t capture it when you can, it is lost forever. The date you wrote that piece? The websites you looked at when you were researching it? The music playing during that photoshoot? You didn’t write it down? Ah, then it’s gone.