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. ( )

This book was interesting mainly because of the completely random information that the author was somehow privy to. I read it for school. ( )

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 ("cataloging for men," they call it). Great, great book!

Most of a year and the completion of my MLIS later, I have to say, this book changed my way of thinking about organization. Every single librarian should read it, as should most computer programmers and Web designers. Weinberger is a funny, engaging writer, and he is nigh-futuristic in his views of organization. ( )

interesting, useful when studying Library and Info science.

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 ]

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! ( )

Discusses the tricky idea of making all information available to all people at all times. Provides examples of current and potential information needs from a variety of areas (corporate, academic, social, archival, etc.) and how these organizations handle those needs (and how their handling could be improved). ( )

A good popular non-fiction explanation of how digitization has changed the information science world. I might recommend that my brother and dad read it so they understand what I'm studying in school. ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/199878.... ( )

Always gratifying when an author uses many of my favorite sources, such as Chandler. This is a very interesting read with significant implications for our culture, how we deal with our own computers, and especially, what is going to happen to Gartner. As ( )

Worthwhile reading, though there are some folksy anecdotes and asides that can easily be skipped. The historical references to the likes of Dewey, Mendeleev, their contemporaries and intellectual descendants are illuminating. The various attempts (in a wide array of fields) to put knowledge "in its proper place" have been fraught. One of the messages that came across to me is that in the "third order" (his phrase), the connections between bits of knowledge, and the meaning that can be derived from them, are as or even more important than the bits themselves. ( )

The third order of data described in this book by David Weinberger is adding "Consciousness" to the world of Knowledge just as the human mind ads Consciousness to the physical world ( )

A really good book about classification of information, and how it is done in the age of modern information technology. By looking at attempts to classify all known information (Dewey decimal etc) or parts of it (alphabet, table of elements) Weinberger shows the impossibility of that task, and how knowing is a dynamic and collective proces. There are a few places where he isn't that convincing, but all in all a thought provoking book, and you can't ask for much more than that. ( )

I think the following quotation from the end of the book captures the spirit of Weinberger's work and illustrates the Internet's effect on knowledge, information management, and implicit meaning.

"For the first time, we have an infrastructure that allows us to hop over and around established categorizations with ease. We can make connections and relationships at a pace never before imagined. We are doing so together. We are doing so in public. Every hyperlink and every playlist enriches our shared miscellany, creating potential connections that we can't often anticipate. Each connection tells us something about the connected things, about the person who made the connection, about the culture in which a person could make such a connection, about the sorts of people who find that connection worth noticing. This is how meaning grows. Whether we're doing it on purpose or simply by leaving tracks behind us, the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years" (221-222)

If that quotation excites you, then I recommend you read this book. ( )

Weinberger proposes that the possibilities for ordering information in the digital and networked world can completely change the way we approach knowledge and learning. To make his point, he nicely summarizes organizational schemes of the past including the alphabet, good old Mevil Dewey, Linnaeus, Ranganathan (woo!), the card catalog, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and many more. His overviews are fun to read, well-researched, and deep enough to make his point without getting sidetracked. He then contrasts these traditional methods of organization with the Web 2.0 variety, leaning heavily on Flickr and Wikipedia as examples of tagging and social creation of content. In the end, he points us in the direction of a world filled with user-generated content and context where the interconnections are as important as the information itself, and where creativity and knowledge are found in the spaces between my ideas and your ideas.

This is all pretty heady stuff, but Weinberger is a very readable philosopher who gives his readers plenty of concrete examples to latch onto. Occasionally I found myself getting a little huffy (why, oh why, does he constantly use the card catalog as his illustration of how libraries organize things and never mention the OPAC? Why no mention of brick and mortor libraries that are incorporating Web 2.0 into their cataloging and public access? Why are libraries implicitly lumped in with "the man" who is keeping information out of the hands of the masses? How would he handle providing access to collections that are both physical and digital?). But once I calmed down a little, most of my qualms ended up being addressed elsewhere in the book, or could easily be dismissed by the fact that Weinberger isn't writing a book about libraries or archives, there is just a lot of overlap in what we are trying to accomplish.

This is a great book to read if you are a librarian, a library-wanna-be, an archivist, a techie, a scholar, a Flickr user, a philosopher, or just some jerk who likes to find things on the Internet. ( )

Yet another book about the future of disintermediation.

I'm going to use some of the examples in this book in my recent crusade for tagging at my company. ( )

I've posted a review here: http://wartaalman.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )

You think you know how to catalog a book. Think again as that book relies first on metadata to describe its contents or then goes digital where hundreds of tags may be assigned by readers who are trying to make sense of their information world. Our clients are cataloging now and they are not using Dewey, Sears, or LC. What does the Internet do to the organization of information? Worth thinking deeply about. ( )

Excellent book. Lots of inspiration. ( )

This book has caused quite a stir in library blogs, and beyond. It’s dangerous! We all need to read it!

I don’t know about dangerous. Reading it I often had a sense of deja vu; pomo, relativism, social constructivism etc all go by. And a great many of the ideas are familiar from my library school days; Ranganathan gets a look in. It’s nice to see previous ideas given credit; often books like this read like a giddy ‘whoah, we’ve found a new world!’ exposition.

What do I think Weinberger is saying in the book? That all orders are parochial and contingent; that what we need is not set orders but richer metadata so people can build their own orders. That the more information the better, so long as we let it be free. All of which seems reasonable to me.

Now to my arguments with the book. Most fundamentally, most things aren’t born miscellaneous. They become it on the web. But are all the possible combos as useful? The ‘ordered’ ones, ironically, will win out.

There needs to be a balance when looking at information; the pure ‘weightless’ nature of information should not lead us to overplay its place and impact. The web is not the world. I don’t think Weinberger is saying that, but in discussing ‘information’ this view is often reached. The physical will be with us for a long time, and we need to work on better ways of ordering it for all- which many librarians have been doing.

Weinberger argues that we will inevitably have more; more photos, nore documents. This may be so, but can we not learn to ‘postpone’ before even making information? The ease of digital creation is an issue here. A lot of the ‘need’ for miscellany derives as much from the volume of information as in its digital nature.

In terms of the impact of miscellany, is it more about tools than ontological shifts? Using digital information and related tools, we can do a lot of what was foreseen, e.g. Ranganathan’s adjustable shelves. A great deal of what is suggested in the book could have been done before; it is the ease of so doing that allows us to realise those ambitions in the digital world.

I see the third order of order as easier in the digital world, not something that could only happen with it. Individual libraries, subcultures etc; all have ordered differently from the ‘accepted,’ even with the restrictions of paper.

We can still usefuly use second order schemes, Weinberger argues; so long as we realise that they are not the only order, or even the best. I can’t see any problem with that; we increasingly realise that the map is not the thing. Some second-order schemes, such as UDC, could be used as switching languages; for example, to translate people’s individual tags so as to improve finding.

My principal concern is with the reality of power; the issue of theownership of miscellany. Maybe we ‘own’ it in a psychological sense, but legally? Google et al are companies; someone somewhere has control. There is a need to shift laws on ©, as many have noted, before all this sharing can be a practical worry free long-term operation. Unless Open Source lives up to its promise. And then there is the issue of preserving all of this data. Weinberger is relentlessly positive, and any issues will be solved through the existence of the problems themselves- ‘we have to.’

There is also the ease with which the past is patronised. Only ‘we’ have social reading/consuming, only ‘we’ share, only ‘we’ know the fallacy of trees of knowledge. To take the example of sharing our experience of reading, we can do so more easily, but reading a paper book is not inhererently asocial.

Reading this book put me in mind of a criticism of a history book; that it reads with the breathless certainty that the truth has been run to ground only in our time- even if that truth is that there is no ‘truth.’

That said, it’s not a bad book. The writing style is easy and Weinberger provides a lot of examples to back up his position. He has a passion for miscellany, and it would be churlish to be too critical of someone for writing with passion. Where it becomes a problem is in the ahistorical, uncritical and either/or tone that sometimes crops up.

As one voice amongst many it deserves to be heard, and in library circles it could offer a useful introduction to the idea that the digital actually isn’ t that scary. ( )

http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/20... ( )