If you think about your experiences on the internet, you might find that some of the more deeply engaging ones haven’t always depended exclusively on the content you’re consuming.

It’s an elusive concept, that in the world of web development we refer to as metadata. Loosely described, metadata is information and insight into data and how it moves around. Metadata might be the time you visited, how many pages you went to during your visit, what country you’re from or which links brought you to each page. It doesn’t focus on the “what” and “why” so much as the “who”, “where”, “when” and “how”. As web developers, we typically focus on using metadata to return marketing information about visitors or to improve how well web sites are described for search engines.  Read more...