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One of my laments concerning the internet age is that not enough publishers use high quality metadata to identify their content.

By metadata, I mean hidden parts of content which seek to describe that content. So metadata can be loosely defined as data which is explicitly concerned with data. In essence it tells us what we are reading. The data in question may be the name of an author, publisher information, an (e)ISSN or key words about the content. As an end user, you can’t see this, but a computer programmed to interact with the document can, and is able to extract the information and put it to use.

And yesterday, a big step forward was taken. Twitter have announced they will be allowing users to add metadata to tweets. This will go an incredibly long way to helping users extract meaning from a service that, while valuable, has sometimes resembled a sea of incoherent babble (@F1000 and @TheScientistllc aside of course).

The details are as follows (/HT Nextweb.com for kindly translating into layman)