Without a Traceroute

Day two of the HAIP festival was mostly lectures. Kiberpipa is putting together a video archive of all the lectures from the festival, so you can watch them for yourselves there, there’s also text explanations from the HAIP program here.

The first talk was by a woman named Eleonora Oreggia. She has an idea for something she calls “Virtual Entity” which would be a universal, shared, collaborative metadata system for files. She wanted the system to be decentralized, automatically updating to take into account new revisions of the file, and allowing for people to comment on it. She gave an example of the problems with current, static metadata systems: if she uploads an early version of an artwork, without filling in all the metadata, and somebody downloads that file, then later when she finished the file and fills out the rest of the metadata, then anyone who downloaded the file earlier would have bad, incomplete/out of date metadata.
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