Comments on: Everything is Miscellaneous Book Review

By: This is why David Weinberger rocks my socks! Everybody Scream! « Compassion in Politics

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 08:15:09 +0000

[...] recently Everything is Miscellaneous, chatted it up with me and Johnathon Trenn in the comments at Marketing Conversation. If you don’t know who David Weinberger is check it out here. He is one of the thought [...]

By: Communication and Education = R/evolution | Vision of Students and You « Compassion in Politics

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:47:20 +0000

[...] 30th, 2007 · No Comments Is everything miscellaneous? For us? For today’s students? Folks like Weinberger and Mike Wesch and his students are [...]

By: David Weinberger

David Weinberger — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:52:21 +0000

Nathan, thanks for the questions, and Kevin, thanks for the awesome response (as Nathan notes). Did I mention that it was awesome?

Nathan, the principles that I point to I intend to be in contrast to how we’ve managed info before the digital age. Before, we thought the perfect organization – the one that mirrored the way the world is – had each item (“leaf”) in exactly one category (“branch”). So, we had to decide if Pluto really is a planet or platypuses (platypi?) are mammals. In the digital age, it’s usually helpful to put things into as many categories as you can. Since spammers want their stuff to show up everywhere, they too will try to put it into multiple categories. E.g., they’ll tag their detergent as “britney,” But, tagging systems have a natural inhibitor against spam since tagging relies on aggregating lots of people’s tags. It’s not perfect, but then what is?

As for your second point, I do mean it literally, yet I think tags remain useful as metadata. But not just tags. Think of all the ways you could now unearth a page about, say, “Moby-Dick.” Tags might take you there. So might reviews. Blogs. Bibliographies. A whale sighting tour page might point at it, as might an anti-whaling page. You could get from Emerson to the page in 2 clicks at most. And you could even randomly extract a sentence from the book and find the page that way. Everything now links to everything else, although you may have to stop at Kevin Bacon’s page first. That makes it much easier to go from what you know to what you’re looking for.

Thanks again, Kevin and Nathan.

– David Weinberger

By: » More on Everything is Miscellaneous Marketing Conversation - New Marketing and Social Media by Abraham Harrison LLC

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 06:37:14 +0000

[...] Comments Nathan Ketsdever on Everything is Miscellaneous Book Review» Consumer Watch does Search Engines Marketing Conversation – New Marketing and Social Media [...]

By: Nathan Ketsdever

Nathan Ketsdever — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 06:20:26 +0000

Thanks for the awesome response!! I have a couple ideas in regard to two of Weinberger’s principles.

>>Weinberger’s second principle is to “put each leaf on as many branches as possible.”

This seems to risk spam, although I’m sure he covers this in the book. Also, I guess if you legitimately add value then the accusation of spam is less true.

>>His third principle for us to follow is that “everything is metadata and everything can be a label.”

I think that this is important, especially to the extent that Flickr photos of people with tags about emotion are literally twice as valuable because there is far more context. Alternatively, i think this proposition taken to its literal extreme makes tags entirely useless. Although, I’m sure he takes both of these criticisms into effect. Thanks again for your insight!

By: Kevin Donlan

Kevin Donlan — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 02:05:38 +0000

Nathan, Weinberger lays out four “new” strategic principles that are emerging, which might answer your questions about him having solutions for folks trying to keep up with their digital lives and his feelings on whether or not things should be changed. He claims that these principles are now “severing the ties between the way we organize physical objects and ideas.” His first suggestion is to “filter on the way out, no on the way in.” He claims that filtering your information on the way in decreases the value of your abundance of resources by ruling out items that might be of great value to a few people. He feels that filtering information on the way out, on the other hand, increases the value of the abundance by locating what’s of value to a particular person at that particular moment. This system thus makes the information that you hold that much more valuable. He gives and example of a physics professor at McGill University that “started an electronic bulletin board that posts new findings for any astronomy research as soon as it can be summarized.” The professor doesn’t apply any criteria to decide for the reader whether the research is important enough to be included; it is up to the reader to be the filterer. It is almost as if Marketing Conversation is run this way. We all have the freedom to post knowledge. Then, the more eyes that glance upon this knowledge, the more filtering gets done, thus leaving us with a succinct, cohesive, valuable idea.
Weinberger’s second principle is to “put each leaf on as many branches as possible.” He explores how it is to our advantage to “hang” information in as many places as possible. His example deals with a digital camera that you want to sell in your online store. By listing “its under as many categories as you can think of, including cameras, travel gear, Casio products, graduation gifts, new items, sale items, and perhaps even sports equipment,” it makes that product/information more usable to the “customer” and thus more profitable.
His third principle for us to follow is that “everything is metadata and everything can be a label.” This principle may be more useful for people looking to sell books, but it still is a good suggestion for anyone. He gives an example of how not only can every word in a book count as metadata (which can be searched for), but also any of the sources that link to the book itself. This will not only make sites easier to use, but it also vastly increases the level of knowledge based on the connections.
His final “suggestion” is for us to “give up control.” He almost knocks his second principle with this statement. He understands why building a “tree” may help you surface information that might otherwise be hidden, but seems to be more of an advocate of building a “big pile” of miscellaneous information. He states that you will come across more relationships that would otherwise be unrecognizable. To clarify this point, he uses an example from iTunes, one of his favorite references throughout the book. Weinberger declares that “iTunes shows users a branch that pulls together albums by a particular artist, but the millions of playlists that users have made there find relationships that the organizers of iTunes could not possibly have foreseen, from techno versions of children’s songs to tracks played at someone’s third wedding.” Putting it simply, the owners of information no longer own the organization of that information.
Hopefully this gave you a little more insight into what Weinberger is bringing to the plate in the ever-changing digital world. I am not familiar with the other books that you have listed, but I can tell you that Everything is Miscellaneous is definitely a must read and really pushes the envelope of while giving great analysis of the new digital order.

By: Nathan Ketsdever

Nathan Ketsdever — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:37:17 +0000

Great post! I can’t wait to read the book as well as Keen.

Does Weinberger have any unique solutions for folks trying to keep up with their digital lives?
Does he think anything should be changed?
If I’ve already read Cluetrain and Naked Conversations, but not Long Tail or Wisdom of Crowds do you recommend this or something else?