Chapter 8: Timeshifting Life 331 3 and is especially visible in online music stores, such as Apple iTunes. The information about artists and songs is automatically included in all purchased music. The options given above – top-down or bottom-up – will probably co-exist for some time, so that the dominance makes a slight transition from bottom-up to top-down. The reasons are simple, as the metadata is increasingly created automatically today, without any universal de facto standard, there will be loads of incompatible, media type-, appli- cation-, and manufacturer-specifi c metadata formats around for some time. Also, if people create metadata manually, the semantics of an attribute and its value may differ between people. Once new applications and devices supporting more generic stan- dards of metadata management become commonplace (devices that are capable of converting proprietary metadata formats to the then- available de facto standard), the dominance is shifted towards the top-down approach. Pre-existing metadata is converted and checked for consistency once it is encountered, which slowly converts old metadata to new standards. As discussed in Chapter 5, extensibility of the de facto metadata standard allows any third-party content provider to implement their own fi lters and converters for any fi le type, make their contribution to the global ontology, and thus making the rare content type future- proof. Nevertheless, the two approaches to metadata creation will continue to co-exist now and in the foreseeable future. One should not underestimate the infl uence of communities related to personal content and metadata creation. For instance, in Chapter 7 4 we presented YouTube and similar social services and applications that allow creating and sharing content and metadata. We again emphasise that virtual communities related to personal content are a strong candidate for driving metadata creation and subsequent meta- data sharing. 8.3 Show Me the Money Provided that the importance of metadata is as predicted above, it seems evident that metadata can enhance existing applications and services in a number of ways. This better, stronger, faster functionality translates to a better user experience, which means happier customers, which means more money. 3 http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/ 4 http://www.youtube.com/