Editorial Reviews:
?Perfectly placed to tell us what?s really new about [the] second-generation Web.??Los Angeles Times Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world?in which everything has a place?are upended. In the digital world, everything has its places, with transformative effects: ? Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable. ? There?s no such thing as ?too much? information. More information gives people the hooks to find what they need. ? Messiness is a digital virtue, leading to new ideas, efficiency, and social knowledge. ? Authorities are less important than buddies. Rather than relying on businesses or reviews for product information, customers trust people like themselves. With the shift to digital music standing as the model for the future in virtually every industry, Everything Is Miscellaneous shows how anyone can reap rewards from the rise of digital knowledge.
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.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 24 total reviews (Page 1 of 5):
 Based ojn bug misconception
interesting ideas but mostly cheer-leading for web 2.0. the book is at least somewhat worth reading in that he brings up key issues, even if his analysis of them is flawed.
most of the book is based strongly on an argument with a fundamental error in the premise. according to the author, card catalogs obey a strict organizational theme, but data bases do not. actually they do, and are in ways even stricter and more ordered. The computer essentially imposes order even in our "miscillaneous" groupings, which are just another label in the system.
the author argues for something like a "wisdom of crowds" but doesn't seem to fully grasp why that works. it's not that crowds simply don't need experts, but crowds that include a variety of kinds of experts, guess right more often than any single expert.
if his arguments are believed (and much about them is interesting) then this book should have been a blog. why wasn't it? probably the author knows the important differences, but writing about blogs got hiom a lucrative contract with a publishing house.  Everything is Miscellaneous, but . . .
. . . unlike the Internet, our time is not infinite. So, while the Internet has allowed for total randomness, for the sake of each individual's time, there needs to be some order. And, while it's nice to think that tags and other technologies will do this, so far, they have created their own disorder and randomness.
So, what has actually happened is a site like Wikipedia has become our defacto "rule of order". Just do a search on any topic. Most likely, the Wikipedia entry will be in the top 3. And of course, there is a reason for that: We the people want order.  Valuable Overview
I totally disagree with the reviewers that pontificate against this book. It is not a techno-geek book, or a philosophy book, it is simply a common sense overview that I personally consider to be educated, helpful to the point of essential. At $16, with the Amazon discount, this book is a bargain.
I started with the index, and immediately discovered Meta-Data had 18 lines.
The book opens with examples from Staples ("hacking the physical") to Apple iTunes (end of bundling) and I am immediately charmed by the combination of an end to fraudulent store organization (Giant supermarket moves everything from one week to the next to force searching which increases impulse buying) and an increase in focus on serving the individual rather than serving up a "one size fits all" solution. Separately I am looking at Chinese medicine for a health intelligence book, and this resonates.
Early on one sees the author agreeing with Jean Francois Noubel (the end of the pyramidal organization) and Jim Rough (rise of the circle of citizen wisdom)--I myself enraged the secret intelligence mandarins by announcing in the 1990's that "in the age of decentralized information central intelligence is an oxymoron." The author is one of the gurus of what is becoming known as the axis of Cognitive Science and Collective Intelligence (the Art), and he and another 54 authors are brought together in the first collective work of its kind, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace which is also free online in full pdf or chapter docs. Disclosure: I published the book--I do not know the author personally, but Jock Gill, a gifted communicator, exposed me to the author's earlier work on Open Spectrum, something that inspired my own informal views on "Open Everything" and unlike most of the other contributors that were identified by Tom Atlee or Mark Tovey (the editor), I personally sought his contribution to the book because of my very high regard for his "take" on all this.
I bought the book as a fan already, but the content easily validates my appreciation The discussion of first order pigeon-holing (the Weberian concept of bureaucracy applies), second order cross referencing (naturally limited and often wrong in early generations--Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are toast), versus unlimited tagging, chunking, clustering, socially-informed selection, and other aspects of the power of the collective, are all illuminated by this book.
I am further impressed early on with his stellar discussion of Mortimer Adler and the limitations of alphabetization. I was a penniless graduate student when I discovered the Great Books, and as a young officer, spent my first $700 acquiring a set. The Syntopicon that the author mentions in the book is better understood by the image I introduce above, something I created in 1979, my second of four analytic models (the first was on predicting revolution across all domains).
I have two notes at this point:
1) Truth or what can be known constantly changing, a fixed or slow to adapt "index" process cannot scale or survive.
2) 2008 election is already lost--neither candidate offers us what we deserve: listening instead of stump speeches; appointed cabinet and balanced budget now, as part of the campaign, instead of empty promises; and 24/7 interaction with all 65 political parties, instead of focusing on the one third that is their base and a slice of the middle third.
He emphasizes that knowledge is not top down, and with a tip of the hat to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and also facilitator for the nation-wide network of 27 separatist movements, I also post above an image of Epoch B "bottom up" leadership that none of our world leaders understand.
Page 80, discussion of Ranganathan (India) Colon Classification system impresses me. I think to myself, wow, needs to be integrated into Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language, or IEML.
The middle of the book discusses--engagingly, I feel--how the digital world enables infinite variations in relationships and labels that can in turn create infinite variations of just right, just in time, just enough visualizations.
Crowd tagging leads to sub-set clustering which leads to contextual sense-making.
He spend time on Wikipedia. I admire Jimbo Wales and try to attend the Wikimanias, but I have given up on Wikipedia because in the case of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) page, I had to give up--while the author would have me engage and patiently lead the recalcitrant along (I have 20 years experience with that in the real world) I have come to a different conclusion: I believe that anyone should be allowed to CREATE, but only master moderators should be allowed to destroy.
The summary of the book's message is offered by the author with four concepts:
1) Filter on the way OUT, not in (this is the difference between the read only publishing model, and the read-write Creative Commons model)
2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible--unlike the physical world, each leaf can have infinite lives
3) Everything is meta data and everything can be a label (he provides a fine discussion of bar codes, RFIDs, and Thinglinks)
4) Give up control. He admires Wikipedia for doing precisely that. When I first started the modern OSINT movement in 1992, I coined the phrase, "Give up control to gain control" meaning that centralized intelligence had to give way to decentralized sharing and sense-making. The spies still don't get it, but public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay. A corollary here is that the best approach is to include all--optimize inclusiveness and diversity; and where there is conflict or disagreement, postpone exclusion or resolution, more data later will make it easier and easier to come back to...
The final section of the book deals with mapping the implicit, mining the clouds of tags, creating an infrastructure of meaning with infinite potential. I have a note: unites the eight tribes of intelligence (governmenbt, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions).
Other flyleaf notes:
+ Stupid works. Keep it simple and let it evolve on its own.
+ Bit by bit, not all at once. Provide for innovation at the intersections and on the margins
+ Kind of and sort of rule, not the black and white that did rule
+ I learn of Valdis Krebs and his concepts of social cartography
+ I am engaged with the discussion of information sprawl and natural typologies
+ The author concludes that the search for knowledge will constantly struggle between the simple and the complex (sources and methods).
+ Going meta is what is so cool about web ecology and evolution.
The author does NOT say this, but I mark his book down as being in favor of the human web of sense-making beating out the semantic web and machine learning schools.
Page 230, this is a quote that really grabs my attention: "It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individual thinking out-loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity." The rest of this page is equally good.
I am surprised to learn that the author holds a PhD in philosophy, and that he advised Howard Dean. I am not surprised to learn that he has been twice renewed as a fellow at the Berkman Center.
Other books that have engaged me and for which I have reviews:
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
There are many others, most obvious. Please do see the two images I post above--I firmly believe that the last eight years were a gift from heaven, a necessarily catastrophic gutting of our Nation so that we might properly conclude that both political parties stink with corruption, and it is time we put We the People back into the Republic, 24/7. This book is a solid brick in our foundation for understanding why this is both possible, and necessary.  The New Enlightenment
Order reduces options. Classical education inclines the mind to idealism.
Through the ages we have grown heavy with hierarchical matter, isolated by divisive, absolute, classified ideologies in the name of order maintained as truth by authority. Now "Everything is Miscellaneous" glories in a new vision of hope, transparency, understanding, freedom, and peace--a newly enlightened collective consciousness. Weinberger's work is fascinating and exuberant with optimism that we can emerge out of the chaos of messy, unfettered knowledge to global understanding. Western civilization (essentialism) from Plato to Aristotle to Dewey to Jimmy Wales is up for review and the prognosis is good. Read the book; play with tools; enter the conversations; navigate the cosmos, indeed, let knowledge at long last lead to understanding. Every Try Creating/Organizing a Website?
It always frustrated me that I could never get a group to really achieve consensus on the best way to organize a website. Arguments about how to label pages, what to include and not include, etc. dominated discussions. You always ended up with a compromise that people outside of the room end up questioning.
Until you realize, there IS no one right way to organize a web site.
David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous, dramatically details why I was having such a difficult time and the good news -- that increasingly in the digital world, we can stop worrying about how to organize the information and concentrate on providing information that contributes to meaningful understanding.
We're not constrained by front page real estate, column space/sizes, peer-review editorial boards and other feedback filtering mechanisms that came to dominate what he calls the 2nd order of organization. People access knowledge in the digital world through a variety of means and it becomes less important who you are and more important what the perceived value of what you contribute is.
Of course most businesses currently operate under the model he describes of providing the engineered customer experience. They have spent tons of resources building a brand based precisely on who they are and why you should listen to them. They could probably care less about adding to meaning, they just want sales or readers or whatever.
I highly recommend the book to anyone who has ever been frustrated by an attempt to classify or organize -- whether it's organizing a closet, file drawers, deciding where to put a file on a shared drive at work, grading 3rd grade papers, planning a web site or whatever.
Similarly anyone who has ever looked for something and couldn't find it, especially if you consider yourself organized -- you will love how this book opens up your perspective on finding, organizing and searching in the new digital world.
Of course, if you're under the age of like 19, you've grown up with this and the book won't have as much meaning potentially. More Customer Reviews:
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