
At a conference last week, I was subjected to all kinds of talks on data, data integrity, data storage, data in the cloud, and data-centered design patterns. One speaker summed things up perfectly:
If you make the center of your world data, then everything else becomes easy.
This got me thinking. From a computer-centric viewpoint it all makes sense. Our machines are built specifically to store data, crunch data, and present that data to the user.
But I don’t just work with computers. I also read a lot. And I write a lot. And I publish books. And even in the computer world I spend a great deal of time working on WordPress – a tool used primarily for writing.
From the media-centric viewpoint, this argument stops making sense. The most important piece of this blog, for example, is the content. And that content is stored, essentially, as blobs in the database. The data on my server consists of titles, keywords, post dates, views, comments, and other meta information that adds little value to the content itself.
This meta doesn’t provide any meaning to the data/content it’s meant to represent. And that, is a huge failure on our part as developers. [Read more...]


