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Loading... Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorderby David Weinberger
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This book was interesting mainly because of the completely random information that the author was somehow privy to. I read it for school. (  )tundra | May 29, 2009 |   When I started this book, I found I kind of liked it. I read some more and started liking it more. By the end, I was a semi-rabid fan, going around suggesting to everyone that they ought to read it. Weinberger's style is fairly informal, down-to-earth, and entertaining, but not squishy enough to decrease his credibility--I found my views on organization changed as I read through this book, and it only increased my desire to go into metadata librarianship (cataloguing for men). Great, great book. The only book I'm going to finish this semester (and if you've seen my reading list, that's saying a lot). (  )artificialinanity | Dec 26, 2008 | 1  interesting, useful when studying Library and Info science. jazzycat | Dec 17, 2008 | Published in 2007, Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger introduces us to the changes digital technology has brought to information organization and retrieval. Sounds geeky, right? Not at all. Weinberger uses the very understandable example of a photo archive to explain how storing, cataloging, and finding a particular photo has gone from an expensive, laborious process accessible to very few people, to an inexpensive, easy, real-time activity open to anyone. Web 2.0 technology liberates us from dealing solely with atoms (”real” things) and opens new possibilities using bits (information about the things). A real object can only exist in one place, so it must be precisely placed if we hope to find it again. Data about an object gives us a bit more freedom to make the object retrievable through several different routes. With data (and metadata**) built on web 2.0 platforms like Flickr and LibraryThing, cumbersome cataloging and organization schemes — and those precise placement requirements of the past — can be pushed aside. Everything is miscellaneous now. Everything can be sorted, rearranged, tagged, toyed with, shared, mashed, and discovered all over again. Weinberger’s book is filled with examples and stories that illustrate our new tools and the radically new perspectives they engender. Digital technology makes them possible; the volume and pace of which new information is created makes them necessary; and the value of their collaborative results make it preferable. [More of my reviews are available at http://mostlynf.wordpress.com ] benjfrank | Dec 8, 2008 | This book takes a critical look at organizational structures, with a particular emphasis on Dewey and library classification schemes. Since reading this book, I've become nearly obsessed with the author's indication that the 2nd order (i.e. library catalogs) are regularly bypassed in favor of the 3rd order (i.e. amazon.com) and I'm embarrassed by what we librarians are hanging on to in terms of outdated classification systems. Embarrassed! ( )emilyjean | Oct 1, 2008 | 0.134 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0805080430, Hardcover)Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life. From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.
The Flocking of Information: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay by David Weinberger  As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped. For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If you’re using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one store’s customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general "buzz." (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money. Zillow.com does something similar for real estate. The people behind Expedia.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were looking for a new business idea--and were in the market for new homes. After hunting for information, they found that most of it was locked into the multiple listings sites of the National Association of Realtors. Now Zillow takes those listings and mashes them up with additional information that can help a potential purchaser find exactly what she wants. The most dramatic mashup right now is the "heat map" that uses swaths of color to let you tell at a glance what are the most expensive and most affordable areas. At some point, though, Zillow or one of its emerging competitors will mash up listing information with school ratings, crime maps, and aircraft flight patterns. Wize and Zillow make money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous--letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place. We’re seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a company’s will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
LibraryThing AuthorDavid Weinberger is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
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