How the Web changes the ways we can organize things.

A fun read on information organizaton. Who would have thought it. ( )

This was a fun book. Its central idea is that digital information can be organized in fundamentally different ways than previous information formats. Basically- before, with what Weinberger calls 1st and 2nd order organization, everything in an organizational structure can only exist in one place, a book can only have one Dewey Decimal Number, an animal can have only one place in a taxonomy. This is a limitation of physical media - a book might be about five different things, but you can only put it on the shelf in one place. With the digital medium, however, information can be categorized much more messily, comprehensively, and on the fly. Tagging is the best example of this: you can "categorize" something an indefinite number of times just by affixing tags to it that others can search for. The searching process calls up everything within a category without it having to be stored in category order.

This book said a lot of the things I've been wanting to hear in library science. There is a lot of potential in this type of thinking that has not really been explored. Moreover, it was a fun read- very entertainingly written, with examples made from most of the interesting websites I could think of. And, hey, LibraryThing gets a mention, although just for the barcode scanners. A fun an interesting look at digital organization, or, if you want to look at it that way, and interesting tour through the more innovative corners of the internet. Four stars. ( )

Interesting overview of how our organization (and our brains) are affected by the capabilities of technology. Very fascinating and reader-friendly. ( )

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous is an entertaining and superficial examination of the characteristics of information and how it has been organized by people historically, as well as in today’s world, and potentially in the future. The ways in which information has been stored and manipulated in the past are used by Weinberger as evidence that humans have been bending and shaping information to fit our limitations as atom-based beings. The author believes that in the new digital world information no longer needs to be contorted to fit human behavior and abilities; rather, information can be collected digitally (where it has fewer atoms) and left uncategorized.
Weinberger wanders through time and place in his book, recalling the origins of modern organization, such as the alphabet, Dewey, Ranganathan, Mendeleev’s periodical table, and even as far back as Aristotle and Plato and their philosophical ideas about classification. In doing so, the author illuminates several behaviors inherent to human organization and the limitations of the physical items people have attempted to sort. Throughout the book Weinberger touches on dozens of different topics to defend his thesis. He jumps from century to century, from country to country, all in an attempt to provide examples of the history of information organization and the potential for organization in the future. The author uses practical, fascinating real world examples of many aspects of organization. His enthusiasm is sincere, which makes his argument very convincing. Although the examples are very helpful, they seem to be strung together with little effort to provide context or to defend an ultimately fuzzy thesis. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is too superficial to create a sustainable argument, especially for the library field. ( )