Book reviews: Everything is Miscellaneous

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Deceptively deep, May 3, 2007
By      Ethan Zuckerman
One of the central ironies of David Weinberger's new book, "Everything is Miscellaneous", is that a book about classification is bound to suffer from classification problems. Reviewers and bookstore owners are inclined to think of David as a business writer because his previous books - The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined - were profoundly useful in helping businesspeople understand what this World Wide Web thing was really all about. But it's a mistake to consider David's new book solely as a business book.

Which isn't to say that reading Everything is Miscellaneous won't help you make a buck in world of Web 2.0. It probably will, as the issues Weinberger explores are core to any business that deals with information and knowledge... which is to say, virtually every industry you can think of. But "Everything is Miscellaneous" is also a philosophy book. It's about the shape of knowledge, and how moving information from paper to the web changes how we organize and how we think. And this means that Weinberger's book crosses from territory like Wikipedia and Flickr into Aristotle and Wittgenstein.

This would be a dangerous path for a lesser author to take, but David grounds his explorations in examples and interviews that are, as Cory Doctorow puts it, wonderfully miscellaneous. We bounce between the lives and ideas of taxonomers past - Linneaus, S.R. Ranganathan, and the wonderfully strange Melvil Dewi - and the librarians and software developers who are making sense of today's digital disorder.

At its heart, the book is about what happens when we liberate knowledge from the world of atoms. In the physical world, we can only organize books on a shelf in one way or another - books can't be in multiple places at once. Frequently we find ourselves reduced to ordering information in arbitrary ways as a result - AAAAA Towing Service gets more business through the phonebook than Mike's Wreckers through the unfairness of alphabetization.

Adding a layer of metadata to the physical world helps somewhat - card catalogs allow us to put multiple pointers to a single physical location so we can file a single book on Military Music under both "Music" and "Military". But card catalogs pale in comparison to the wonders of "third-order" metadata, the sorts of organization we're capable of in a digital age. A book listed by Amazon can be filed in any number of categories. It can be annotated with reader reviews, added to reading lists, enhanced with tags or statistically improbable phrases. The "card" in the card catalog can be larger than the book itself, and the full text of the book serves as metadata, as the book itself is searchable.

Weinberger argues that the fact that we tend to organize data in terms of its physical placement has consequences for how knowledge works. We tend to think in Aristotelian terms - objects are members of a categories, and share the same traits as other members of that category. We can organize these categories into trees: a robin is a bird, which is an animal. We can expect the leaves of trees to share the attributes of their branches, and we expect each leaf to fit onto only one, specific branch.

But that's not knowledge works in a digital age. When I bookmark a [...] it's to my benefit to add many tags to it, both because it makes it easier for me to find it again, and because it helps other people find it as well. Weinberger advises us to "put each leaf on as many branches as possible", building a tree that looks more like a hyperlinked pile of leaves.

This suggestion, along with advice to use everything as a label, to filter only when we need outputs, and to give up the idea that there's a "right way" to order things, serve as a roadmap for how to build tools and services in a digital age. But the magic of Weinberger's book is that this practical advice is also an invitation to explore categorization, language and knowledge itself. If knowledge is a pile of leaves instead of a tree, how does the shape of our knowledge change?

It's questions like this that make "Everything is Miscellaneous" deceptively deep. One moment, we're thinking about how we organize photographs in shoeboxes or on our hard drives, and a moment later we're asking whether we understand "shoebox" in terms of definitions, family resemblances or exemplars. It's a little like drinking a mojito - smooth going down, but deceptively powerful, and slightly staggering when you get up to buy the next round.

I've read the book twice now, and am looking to my third pass through it. Weinberger has done something rare and admirable here - he's written about a world I thought I knew well in a way that makes me realize that there are innumerable depths and implications left to explore.

From Aristotle to Del.icio.us, June 17, 2007
By      K. Sampanthar "Inventor of ThinkCube" (Boston, MA) 

As other reviewers have mentioned David Weinberger's new book is a hard book to categorize, which is also the irony, since it's central premise is about categorizing information. I place this book in the company of other books about the internet and information; Ambient Findability - Peter Morville, Wikinomics - Don Tapscott, Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler. To me it's about the changes wrought by current trends on the internet. Weinberger is deeply familiar with internet and all it's implications, since he is one of the original authors of Cluetrain Manifesto which was probably the first book to outline the game changing nature of the internet. Here he tackles how to cope with the seeming chaos of digital information that we are deluged with.

This is a thought provoking book and will make you look at organizing information in a different way. It will help you understand some of the current trends on the internet and put it into historical context.

Audience
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in internet trends especially as it relates to organizing information. If you are at all interested in the history of information and how we as humans have struggled to come to terms with the world, then this book is one of the best I have come across. It is well written and a pleasure to read.

Details
David Weinberger, internet visionary, has again synthesized an intellectual romp through another important topic - Information. We, humans, are obsessed with defining, categorizing /and organizing information as our way of bringing some order to the chaotic world we live in.
Weinberger explores our obsession with information from Plato and Aristotle to our modern-day digital explosion of information.
He frames this exploration by defining 3 orders of organizing information:

1) 1st Order organization is of the physical world, manipulating physical objects and organizing them,
2) 2nd Order of organization is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints.
3) 3rd Order of organization is the world we live in today, as we move from the physical to the digital, organizing information becomes freed from physical constraints allows us to simultaneously define, categorize and organize information into a million different taxonomies.

The 1st and 2nd orders of organization are covered as Weinberger explores the history of our obsession with categorizing information; from Plato's `Joints of Nature', to Aristotle's `Trees of Knowledge'. We have been lumping and splitting information for thousands of years. Until recently we have been constrained by the laws of physics, it is hard for objects to be in two places. It is also hard to categorize the real world into orderly taxonomies i.e. what category does a duck-billed-platypus fit into?

The 3rd order organization is what Weinberger is referring to in his title, `Everything is Miscellaneous'. In a world where we can organize information any way we want, nothing needs to be categorized per-se and everything can live in a state of limbo in the miscellaneous category until we need it and then, and only then, does it need to be grouped, filtered, sorted for our immediate consumption.

The 3rd order world has freed information and people to categorize information anyway they want. It is no longer an academic exercise to come up with taxonomies. With tools like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr etc. we slice and dice the world of information to our personal needs.

Understanding this digital disorder we live in and how we cope is the ultimate point of this book. True to form, Weinberger has given us a wealth of information to ultimately understand where we are today and how to build the tools to cope in the future.

Key Take-Aways
You will come away from this book understanding the following:
- Our historical struggle to organize information from the physical to the digital
- That we live in a new reality where information is freed from its physical constraints.
- The world of information is now available to all of us and can now be organized any way we want.

Summary
If you enjoyed any of Weinberger's previous books (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined) you will not be disappointed. This is a pleasure to read and will make you think - my two most important attributes when it comes to books. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in information and the current trends on the internet. Weinberger has been right on the money with his observations of the internet and this book is no different; organizing information in the age of the internet is an important subject. Read why there is more to information than search alone.

Kes Sampanthar
Inventor of ThinkCube

The way of the (Virtual) World, May 4, 2007
By      Miles Kehoe (Cupertino, CA)
With a background in enterprise search, I'm inclined to think of David's book as required reading for those who doubt how vital meta-data and community tagging is to quality corporate search. In reality, it's about meta-data.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the book is about moving organization and retrieval of content - physical and virtual - from atoms to electrons. Office supply stores, libraries, and daily life are all limited by atoms: how much space there is in a store; what products should be displayed near other products; and what single specific shelf should a new book occupy given the Dewey Decimal system categorization.

In our increasingly virtual world, based on electrons, little of this matters - fax/copying/printer/scanners can be 'stored' under all of those categories, or a new book can be tagged with every possible related term, regardless of what category the librarian suggests. Web 2.0, Flickr, Wikipedia, Enterprise Search 2.0, all of our virtual worlds, will allow us to tag everything in any way that will help us find it again. And we can make it even better by opening the tagging up to a wider audience - friends, co-workers, even strangers - consider Amazon's suggestion system.

The book is a masterpiece and is a must-read for anyone involved in using - or designing - any part of our virtual and future world(s).