I love to write reviews of books I have yet to read. I work too much. Anyway, if I could choose a mentor and a guru, his name would be Howard Rheingold. Howard and I have known each other since 1999 and when he goes gaga over a book, Everything is Miscellaneous, I am his echo chamber (and David Weinberger, another of my idols, is no slouch either) :
“It took me a while to get around to reading David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous, but when I finally did, boy howdy, did my head and the world get rearranged. He’s one of those few writers who makes simple and funny explanations of complex phenomena look easy. And he’s onto something important. It’s not just a new story and a big picture, it’s a new picture and a big story. I think he’s right that most knowledge has been structured and so many institutions has been arranged according to taxonomies and hierarchical file structures simply because we have been arranging knowledge for thousands of years, but we only got search engines recently. Search engines are not just search engines in Weinberger’s new picture, and tagging is not just tagging.”
