Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger

Aug 31, 2007 Ascexis rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: semanticweb, non-fiction, reviewed

Mostly I learned that Weinberger hasn't been paying attention.

Clay Shirky's article in 2005 on ontologies said it earlier, more succintly, and with less self-aggrandizement. Any man (and yes, I mean Weinberger) who gets halfway through a book that he starts by deriding librarians and then tries to reinvent Ranganathan while hoping that if he shoves in a couple of nifty anecdotes about the man librarians won't notice he's having to backtrack rapidly has missed the point, the boat, and the cluebus...more

like 8 likes · see review

Jan 23, 2008 BookBitch added it

People like to ask me about books - I've been asked to name my favorite books, the books I would take to a desert island, and the books that have changed my life. My favorites change from year to year, I would need an entire cruise ship to fill with enough books to sustain me on a desert island, and while books in general have changed my life, I've never had any sort of epiphany while reading, at least not that I can recall. Until now. Reading Everything is Miscellaneous gave me my moment. It wa...more

like 5 likes · see review

Jan 15, 2008 Jenne rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: civilians; librarians who have been living under a rock for the last 5 years

As far as I got, anyway, the author has one thing he wants to tell you in this book: faceted classification is awesome, and now that more things are digitized, we can actually use it.

(Faceted classification is where something is categorized in more than one place, e.g. how you can put a book on more than one Goodreads shelf, as opposed to in real life where it can only be in one physical location)

I kept skipping chapters to see if he had anything else to say, but if he did I missed it. He does...more

like 4 likes · see review

Dec 29, 2008 Sean Howard rated it 5 of 5 stars

What I love MOST about this book are the AWESOMELY hysterical reviews from librarians or Information Science (IA) folk. People who subsequently find themselves more and more affected by the very forces they find so objectionable in this book.

This book deserves a read and rates almost as highly as the Clue Train manifesto. Here's a few choice quotes:

"The result is a startling change in our culture's belief that truth means accuracy, effectiveness requires adherence to clear lines of command and c...more

like 1 like · see review

May 03, 2011 Theresa Macphail rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: information, non-fiction

If there was such a thing as a new technology positivism, then Weinberger could be painted with the label of "positivist." He is so in favor of all things "miscellaneous" - especially online - that this book almost reads like a tract in boosterism for the companies he uses as examples (a charge he tries to head off in his footnotes by admitting that he does indeed work as a consultant for many of said companies). I thought the book was easy to read and I liked Weinberger's discussion of first, s...more If there was such a thing as a new technology positivism, then Weinberger could be painted with the label of "positivist." He is so in favor of all things "miscellaneous" - especially online - that this book almost reads like a tract in boosterism for the companies he uses as examples (a charge he tries to head off in his footnotes by admitting that he does indeed work as a consultant for many of said companies). I thought the book was easy to read and I liked Weinberger's discussion of first, second, and third orders of information and its organization (roughly equivalent to physical/matter, paper, and digitized space). However, I remain less convinced than this author that MORE information necessarily leads us to BETTER information.

The idea that being able to jump between miscellaneous "leaves" of information will inexorably lead us into the promised land of a better understanding of the world is almost silly. I would have been more comfortable if, like Wright's Glut (another recent book on information in the digital age), Weinberger had been more balanced in his assessment of which is more necessary to the aggregation and assessment of information - networks or hierarchies. He is most definitely on the side of networks, and is clearly jubilant that "power" - in the form of the creation of and access to information - is back in the hands of the people on sites such as Wikipedia. What he avoids, however, is any discussion of the power that inheres in the very infrastructures of the World Wide Web, or the fact that most of us use the internet without being able to understand how it works or to design programs for ourselves that might better suit our own "vision."

In the end, I felt that what Weinberger was really writing about was a third order utopia. And it made me uneasy. I prefer a little bit more "Clay Shirky" in my analyses of the effects on the digital age on society and "understanding." Shirky's measured skepticism is clearly needed as a bulwark against Weinberger's type of "rah-rah" reading of our new digital lives.(less)

like · see review

Dec 09, 2010 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

To review this as I experienced it or as I think others would?

This book was published in 2007, the year I finished library school, and presents an overview of classification and metadata issues in a surprisingly entertaining way. It's a good introduction to what librarians actually deal with. (To wit: Not the Dewey Decimal system. Not alphabetizing or stamping anything.) The author introduces different levels of classification. First, the items themselves (say, books on a shelf). Then there's s...more

like · see review

Feb 23, 2010 Paul Ivanov rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

originally reviewed on my blog:

I just finished reading1 David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and I find it to be a pretty engaging description of how the state of knowledge evolved with time, and now it has given me a chance to write down some thoughts.

The basic gist of the book is that knowledge is no longer tied to the physical (e.g. books), which used to limit how one went about organizing and finding it (e.g. Dewey decimal system). Now we can attach as much metadata as our hearts d...more originally reviewed on my blog:

I just finished reading1 David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and I find it to be a pretty engaging description of how the state of knowledge evolved with time, and now it has given me a chance to write down some thoughts.

The basic gist of the book is that knowledge is no longer tied to the physical (e.g. books), which used to limit how one went about organizing and finding it (e.g. Dewey decimal system). Now we can attach as much metadata as our hearts desire, which technology helps us sift through to help us find what we want. Instead of each book having a particular place, as in a warehouse, or a relative position (alphabetical within a subject), an individual leaf of information lives on a multitude of trees simultaneously, and the trees themselves are dynamically created and rearranged for each user on the fly.

The first few chapters focused on how knowledge has been historically organized over the centuries. I did skim through a few of the middle chapters, it seemed to be pretty straightforward commentary on the digital lives most of us now lead – user created content, social tags and lists, auto-recommendation, etc. Some over-simplified, in that sometimes unavoidable awkwardness that comes out of describing something neat and complex yet obvious to those leading digital lives. It was refreshing to read about the downsides of scientific publications like Nature and Science (e.g. good science isn’t enough2 to publish because of how few articles get in, the research has to be “sexy”) and how the new comer PLoS One aims to correct these shortcomings. Because this was just the topic that was discussed at the Neuroscience retreat last year (in a lecture about the then-upcoming PLoS One), scientists care about this stuff and it comes back every so often.

Although I never considered it myself, I totally got it when Danae started her Master of Library Science. I would argue that more than anything else, what we’re producing most of in the world today is information. Perhaps capture and disseminate is a more appropriate description. Information, by itself, is agnostic to how it gets used (or abused). But the Cliff Stoll-ian side of me says that we should be weary of the exponentially growing amount of information, and not just for the obvious Big Brother / privacy reasons (e.g. “Plate reader draws objections of ACLU“).

The non-obvious threat of information is that we’re drowning in it (my claim). Here I’m glad Weinberger mentions Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com3, the basic thesis of which4 is that with more and more information out there, we can all end up listening, watching, and reading only that which reinforces our world view – drowning out everything else without even having to plug up our ears and going “LALALALALA”, but by finding podcasts, channels, and blogs where others are doing the “LALALALALA” for us.

Touched by His Noodly AppendageIn many ways, this leads to huge portions of the population nonsensically parroting something like “Evolution is just a theory” to one another. Scientific theories both explain observed phenomena (why living organisms share so much of their DNA) and make predictions about future observations (my niece’s hair color based on that of her parents, or maybe one you don’t hear about so often: regular use of antibacterial soap might be a bad idea, placing evolutionary pressure on the bacteria to evolve immunity to the soap). Moreover simpler or more elegant, straightforward theories are preferred (aka Occam’s Razor). Which is why Intelligent Design is on par with Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, not science. But this has been better described in other places and elsewhere (suggestions welcome). The point is that I’m worried that there’s no way anyone get through to the people that end up isolating themselves in their own feedback loops. I worry that not enough people engage enough to think on their own. Technology can’t fix this problem. No amount of metadata will ever be enough5.

In this entry, I’ve linked to Wikipedia a few times, and while I agree it should not be regularly used for primary research, I also welcome the explicit uncertainty inherent in a publicly editable wiki, as it reflects the tentative nature of information, and I think we should be somewhat skeptical about a great deal. I have also been recommended, though I have not yet read Manuel Castells’ The Internet Galaxy, though perhaps it is more topical for a future post I’ve been brewing for a while. Has anyone read it? …Anyway, this is my first pass at processing this stuff, hope it’s not too scatterbrained6.

1. In three evening sittings at Moe’s Books↩
2. some might even argue “isn’t required”↩
3. Republic.com starts with a succinct vignette: “the daily me“↩
4. on my quick skimming at the UCD bookstore this past Picnic Day.↩
5. a point I think the book misses↩
6. Cory Doctrow does a better job reviewing the book.↩
(less)

like · see review

Feb 14, 2010 Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Celebration of Digital Disorder!
or
Hurray for Computers!

This was a pretty fun book. At time it felt not-particularly-deep, but I think that may have been mostly toward the beginning, where sure a thing makes sense.

A couple of quotes I pulled out, for whatever reason:

p. 119: The digital world... has never met a piece of information it didn't like - and couldn't put to work.

p. 197-8: Every triple, every playlist, every hyperlink adds value to the mess. None diminishes that value because none actu...more

like · see review

Nov 16, 2009 Adrienne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-count-09, non-fiction

We as a society are still making the transition from a physical, hard copy information world, to a digital information world. Not only does this impact our ability to create and access information, but it impacts the way we organize information, and in ways that are fundamentally different from how we have organized in the past.
This is David Weinberger's theory in the book Everything is Miscellaneous. He does an excellent job of showing the ways that we have internalized the organizing of inform...more

like · see review

Oct 10, 2009 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Amazon.com has Melvil Dewey rolling over in his grave. In the digital age, it is no longer possible or desirable to classify information in only one category. There is no longer a discrete place on the shelf for each book. Instead, we find the 'miscellanizing of information" in which information is categorized in any number of different ways for any different number of users. Instead of searching for a book in a catalog using a controlled vocabulary and author and title, the new user may search...more

like · see review

Jun 29, 2009 Vicky rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was dedicated to librarians; today many of them employed by the variety of industries as the "Knowledge specialists". This book explains why this change in title is happening .The book is about our relation with information and how we access and categorise knowledge differently in the digital era. It is about a move from order to miscellaneous, from Dewey system to numerous databases, social networks and on-line encyclopedias. It is about chaos that creates an amazing surge in knowledg...more

like · see review

Jan 30, 2013 Heather rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Heather by: Professor McKay

Shelves: library-informationsciencetextbook

David Weinberger author of Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the New Digital Disorder, introduces his’ readers to a cast of characters that influenced the categorization and organization of material. Weinberger stated that information came in three orders of order and the first order was the placement of a physical thing and the second order was the structuring of an object containing atoms. A card catalog would be an example of the second order. The third order consisted of data being d...more David Weinberger author of Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the New Digital Disorder, introduces his’ readers to a cast of characters that influenced the categorization and organization of material. Weinberger stated that information came in three orders of order and the first order was the placement of a physical thing and the second order was the structuring of an object containing atoms. A card catalog would be an example of the second order. The third order consisted of data being digitized into bits.

Weinberger referred to knowledge as miscellaneous, explaining that it does not fit into a nice orderly space, contrary to the Dewey decimal system and the alphabetical arrangement of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thus, the problem with the first two orders is the limitations brought on by constraining how society retrieves facts and ideas. The card catalog for instance, only had so much space available to write all that described a book and what connected it to another book or item in a library; in addition, he used the illustration of a tree. The idea behind it was to say that shelves are like branches and the books are the leaves. A book can only fill up one spot on a shelf, just like a leaf can only exist in one place on a branch.

Weinberger wrote in length about the third order, thereby referencing ways through the Internet that an individual could gather and search information. Going back to the leaves and branches scenario, the Internet has many branches and the leaves of knowledge can subsist in more than one place at a time. There is no end to the ways in which something can bridge to something else. It is on a much greater scale that through the Internet knowledge is intertwined in ways that go beyond a few descriptive word searches on a library catalog.
Personally, I thought this book was thoughtful and insightful and it flowed nicely from one subject to the next. And well, let’s face it when you think of reading a book on the organization and categorization of information you might at first want to cringe; however, I thought David Weinberger captivated his audience. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting I found his thoughts and ideas. That being said, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and the aspects of this book that I liked and did not like.

I never really gave much thought, until this class and reading this book, on how challenging and difficult it would be to come up with just the right words to characterize something. Or, the married of ways ideas and knowledge are interconnected and how they differ from one person to the next. An example Weinberger used to capsulate this notion of intermingling of data was pictures, especially digital photos that can be downloaded and arranged on Flickr and the activity of tagging them. He highlighted the mass amounts of pictures being shared and the problems that tagging them creates, because there will be a certain percentage of “ambiguity” involved; seemingly because, each person will have a different meaning and interpretation and that gets shared with everyone. A person can tag a photo “SF,” but does that stand for San Francisco, San Fernando, or Sally Field. That information will only be relevant to the person who tagged it. However, the Internet, Weinberger argued demonstrates the complexity of the branches. A person searching for data on San Francisco will find links that lead them to other links, building a highway that will take them to the best restaurants and sites and to all the great tourist locations, etc.

Some of the things in this book I did not like were the elitist attitudes Weinberger continued to allude to. He stated that people in authority were hoarding information and the access to it, in order to have power regarding how it is distributed. Everyone has an agenda, even this author. I felt the author had an elitist perspective as well, towards the Internet. I think the Internet has enriched our lives, but it has its share of problems too. During our class introductions, most of us referred to the library as a sanctuary. Libraries still hold an important place in society. I do agree that a majority of libraries’ databases could use some updating and connect books and items in a more cohesive way.

One last observation, at times I thought David Weinberger was a tree-hugger, nothing wrong with that. I love trees too and I also enjoy reading e-books; however, I do very much still enjoy the feel of holding a book in my hands and smelling the pages. Furthermore, I do not think I am ready to have every part of my reading experience open to the world at large. I am referring to this passage, “Every time a student highlights or annotates a page, that information will be used—with permission—to enhance the public metadata about the book. Even how long it takes people to get through pages or how often they go back to particular pages will enrich our third-order world (Weinberger, 222).” I wonder how long before it is done without an individual’s permission.

Concepts in the book that related to how I organize my own life were the stuff about organizing the silverware drawer. I think a majority of us do that. Much easier to grab what you need. The section when he talked about how we put our clothes in ordered drawers. So true, I have a place for socks and they all need to match. You cannot have one red and the other orange. In my pantry, I have items clustered together, for example all desserts and snacks in one place, then canned items in another space, and then subdivided; for instance, all canned-corn goes together, etc. I think you get the picture. One last thing, on my goodreads page, I love to make shelves for categorizing the books I have read or want to read.

Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.

(less)

like · see review

Aug 13, 2012 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I bought this book on a lark at a local book shop. It was on their clearance rack, but the title seemed intriguing. For $3.00 I figured it was worth picking up.

The crux of "Everything is Miscellaneous" is that when organization of things, data, information goes digital the traditional ways of ordering of those things, data, and information become increasingly unnecessary. He comes largely from the perspective of libraries and the storage of books. We are by now used to the ideas of alphabetical...more I bought this book on a lark at a local book shop. It was on their clearance rack, but the title seemed intriguing. For $3.00 I figured it was worth picking up.

The crux of "Everything is Miscellaneous" is that when organization of things, data, information goes digital the traditional ways of ordering of those things, data, and information become increasingly unnecessary. He comes largely from the perspective of libraries and the storage of books. We are by now used to the ideas of alphabetical order and separating books into different sections/genres/topics. This sort of ordering has long been done because there had to be a way of making sense of all the books so that they would be easy to locate when desired. The problem Weinberger points out is that alphabetical order is a somewhat arbitrary way of ordering things and is not some sort of divinely inspired method of sense making. Similarly, categorizing books for shelving is face with the challenge that a single physical copy of book cannot occupy the several sections in which it might be appropriately shelved. And the categories for shelving are in and of themselves often historically contingent. However, with the advent of Web 2.0 and tagging users are able to assign multiple meaning, categories, lists, etc. about books, data, and information without changing the physical properties of those books, data, and information. This is because, as Weinberger repeats several times, bits don't care where they are. As such the arbitrary ordering and categorization methods of the past can be thrown out the window. Everything is now miscellaneous and users have the power to reorder and disassemble orders as they choose.

Overall, I'd say Weinberger makes a pretty good argument about the ways that computers and Web 2.0 have disrupted traditional categorization and ordering. I do have a few qualms. First, when the author uses a hypothetical individual in a hypothetical situation, it is always a woman. Now I know for a long time this character would have always been masculine, but that practice has largely left contemporary writing. Why not just alternate between both male and female characters for the hypothetical? To me it seemed like Weinberger was trying to make up for all the texts that only used male hypothetical characters. It felt overly self-conscious and was rather annoying.

Also, I think he overstates his point. First, by about 6 or 7 chapters in I was starting to wonder if he was going to say anything new (Not really).

Finally, he seems to skirt around the fact that in spite of the increasing digitalization of the everyday we still interact quite frequently with a material world. As such the things we interact with can only occupy one space at once and each space can only be occupied by one thing. While he is correct that the ordering and categorization schemes we use to make sense of the world are unnatural, they are still pertinent. I could look up flour online and see that it is tagged by "baking" and "shaming", but ultimately when I go to pick it up from the grocery to buy it, I'm going to the baked goods aisle. I still have to interact with traditional ways or ordering because I am interacting with the material world. Everything can be miscellaneous, this is true. When we move away from our digital devices it often times is not.(less)

like · see review

Sep 04, 2009 getAbstract rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An amazing journey into new ways of organizing information

More than ever, knowledge is power, and as computerization and digitalization reshape society, the way knowledge is organized dictates how people obtain it and apply it. In this fascinating book, philosophy professor David Weinberger chronicles the history of changes in access to knowledge. He shows how Internet-based enterprises such as iTunes and Wikipedia reflect new rules of knowledge organization. This intellectually provocative and...more

like · see review

Mar 14, 2010 Tom rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There are some concepts in this book that I'm on board with, namely that tagging and loosely defined ontologies associated with items make those items easier to find digitally. I also think that searching for meaning, vs. information, is a great pursuit. I came away from reading this book discouraged at the thought of the Internet circa 2010 providing that sort of meaning.

Not only are semantic connections between documents on the Internet weakly established, but they are hardly used, with nothin...more

like · see review

Feb 06, 2010 Purple rated it 5 of 5 stars

David Weinberger is one of those rare individuals who can pull together bits of knowledge from areas most of us would consider dissimilar and show an intricate web of connection. While I picked the book up because of my fascination with the subject, digital disorder, I found myself even more engrossed in following Weinberger's ease of talking about topics as varied as Shakespeare, silverware and shopping. I find my ideas about alphabetization and the Dewey Decimal system challenged more fundamen...more

like · see review

Jul 24, 2009 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

Both Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch and David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous tackle the same essential question: what happens when the whole world puts all of it's information on the same network? Carr focuses on the trend toward centralized computing to make sense of mass quantities of information as cheaply and efficiently a possible. Weinberger aims his focus at new attempts to organize, categorize, and make sense of the information. I feel that both books also share the same weakne...more Both Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch and David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous tackle the same essential question: what happens when the whole world puts all of it's information on the same network? Carr focuses on the trend toward centralized computing to make sense of mass quantities of information as cheaply and efficiently a possible. Weinberger aims his focus at new attempts to organize, categorize, and make sense of the information. I feel that both books also share the same weakness: Carr often uses his argument as a pretext to rant about all he sees as wrong with the Internet while Weinberger frequently makes unrelated tangents to defend his beloved Internet against the naysayers.

Everything is Miscellaneous makes two basic arguments: 1.) there is no single way to categorize digital information and 2.) with so much information the role of knowledge is less about establishing objective truth and more about enabling common understanding. (More recently, Weinberger says "transparency is the new objectivity".)

In the summer of 2002 I bought my first digital scanner. The previous year I took nine months off from school and traveled around the world on a ticket that cost me less than $2,000. I had two shoeboxes full of photos; one from the trip, and the other with every photo I took before the trip. The photos from my trip were organized by country, but the photos from before the trip were organized by person. Now I was about to scan them into my computer and I needed to come up with a standard system to organize them. Would I put them into folders based on person, place, event, camera, or even the type of photo (landscape, portrait, black & white, color, etc.)? Fortunately I decided on organizing them based on time, but it sure made it a pain in the ass to find all photos of a particular person.

A few years later and I imported all my photos into iPhoto which allowed me to label each photo with multiple tags. Now every photo I import is tagged with its place, the people in it, the event, and the type of photo. If I want to see all my photos from South Africa or all my photos of Sparsh I simply perform the right search and an on-the-fly "folder" appears with the relevant photos. And it's not just photos I do this with. I tag my video using iMovie, my documents using Together, and even my financial records using Cha-Ching. But what is important is that tags allow us to place digital information in more than one digital shoebox. We organize information based on the appropriate context, and online context changes rapidly.

I was hoping to learn some new information about tag-based organization of information, but this book pretty much sticks to the basics. I also wish that it did a better job dealing with some of the criticisms of tags, but Weinberger's blog is a much better resource for digging deeper on the issue than this book.(less)

like · see review

Nov 11, 2010 Jennifer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: information-science, information-architecture, information-age, web-2-0, power-and-authority

How is the digital world organized? Is there a set of appropriate criteria? Weinberger explains how the metadata we apply to our information with the use of tags, descriptions, and reviews like this, not only give it private meaning, but adds to the meaning of the whole. Weinberger’s style, illustrations, and wit make this topic entertaining and powerful. He illustrates how the basic rules of order have changed in the information age. The power to organize and define data, content, and context i...more

like · see review

Feb 12, 2009 Yofish rated it 3 of 5 stars

His thesis is that the information available on the web is very different that what preceded it. Partly because now more information is better---you can have more info about a thing than the thing itself, and that's still good. And that's better because each individual can arrange info to suit their own needs. Nobody's dependent on someone else to put it "right," and the physical world doesn't get in the way of putting things on the same "shelf." A long and interesting defense of Wikipedia. And...more

like · see review

Dec 20, 2009 Jen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Three stars, not for content and execution of the book, but for the discussions generated. Would have given it 2 stars max otherwise. Too repetitious, should have been condensed into one article, and not really as ground-breaking or revelatory as the author seems to think. Even way back in 2006, the positive aspects of wikipedia and the internet were not unknowns. Others have covered those points already.

One of my issues with the book pertains to certain fallacies sprinkled throughout. For insta...more

like · see review

Nov 16, 2007 Sarah rated it 1 of 5 stars

Absolutely ridiculous book, for exactly the opposite reason as The Cult of the Amateur. As a librarian his laissez faire approach to information categorization and storage made me physically ill.

like 1 like · see review

Aug 22, 2009 Amanda BeReckonedwith rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Amanda by: Jessica

Shelves: recommended-to-me, nonfiction, reviewed

This author makes some excellent arguments for the wisdom of the tags on the internet and the potential they have for re-ordering anything at a stroke of the keys. I really enjoyed his humor and his tales about classifiers such as Dewey (Dui to his pre-professional friends), Ranganathan, Mendeleev and Railsback. Taking organization out of a two-dimensional model on paper(s) and putting into machines with the ability to sift, sort, and amaze at the juxtapositions that come into focus by the large...more This author makes some excellent arguments for the wisdom of the tags on the internet and the potential they have for re-ordering anything at a stroke of the keys. I really enjoyed his humor and his tales about classifiers such as Dewey (Dui to his pre-professional friends), Ranganathan, Mendeleev and Railsback. Taking organization out of a two-dimensional model on paper(s) and putting into machines with the ability to sift, sort, and amaze at the juxtapositions that come into focus by the large numbers of unconnected users who have named some totally unrelated things in similar ways makes the work of knowledge gathering seem a beautiful and organic process whose value will enrich the world immensely.

I liked this book and, having not spent a lot of thoughtful time on tags and metadata, it was very useful. The author helped me think more about the internet as a shifting land of ideas in which adding content helps refine and define the already existing content.

BUT, what I kept thinking about while reading was that this book was about ordering and not really about disorder. I flinched every time the author seemed to privilege the metadata and bytes over the jumble of photos in my closet. I understand his point in seeking order, but I felt a little cheated by the title he chose and I kept hoping for his revelation of the secret that would make of the internet a place where I could find the serendipity I love in the physical world, in which I always go to the back of a store first to look at the sale rack, where I know I will find the most random collection of things available in a shop - the overlooked, imperfect and potential-laden objects that share the tag of what?... of having been in the store the longest, perhaps. I wanted to learn how to find the items on the internet that exist without any tags because they are as yet un-ordered, potential-laden, lacking a tree of classification. I wanted to find out how to spread a net and find the unlikely to be on the front page, the real miscellany.(less)

like · see review

Jun 03, 2008 Susana rated it 4 of 5 stars

From atoms to bits and how we all can add and retrieve information in the third order.
Dewey, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and much, much more.

like 1 like · see review

Jul 10, 2011 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

Reading this as a librarian gives it a special twist. Fascinating book with lots of insite and every page reminds us librarians that in this digital age we are not gatekeeprs or even guides, we are helpers and facilitators, and if we are anything else we will be irrelevent. Whether it is reference, readers advisory, cataloging or whatever, people now are used to having access to information, and more importantly, control over how that information is organized and presented. And there is one prin...more

like · see review

Apr 01, 2011 Phil Newman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed the book. As someone who tags everything and is really focused on keeping my iPhoto library organized the concepts presented really appealed to me. I'd jumped into tagging and never considered the fact that it does hide other information. Yet another example of extremes - somewhere in the middle is a happy medium.

A couple of things that stuck with me:
- Wikis reduce emails by about 75%; I want to test this theory in real life!
- The discussion of org charts was interesting. Corpo...more

like · see review

Aug 03, 2010 Bárbara rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: academic

Interesting, but not terrific. I guess because it was published in 2007 -- so what might have been a mind-opener back then, it is now a pretty obvious account of the "digital disorder".

The overall argument is that the new digital disorder (the third order) can bring us a lot of advantages. Very briefly, the first order is the one of the physical objects; the second order is connected to some cataloged/archived information about the object (e.g. a library card catalogue); and finally, the third...more

like · see review

Sep 17, 2008 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars

from the library c2007 there is pressure on this book at the library so I will reask in 18 weeks

from the library computer:

Summary: Philosopher Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings constantly collect, label, and organize 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...more

like · see review

Sep 13, 2008 Margot rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: professional, non-fiction

Weinberger discusses the "three orders of order" at length in this book that brings together practice and theory of knowledge management, library science, computer science, and other organizational related disciplines. These "three orders" are basically the first order of a file cabinet or archive or pile of papers, the second order of a file cabinet with an index to the files inside (or a card catalog for a library), and the third order of digital miscellany, which incorporates tagging, metadat...more

like · see review

Jun 14, 2008 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Totally thought-provoking. My brain is full when I think about the things we deal with every day in the land of information overload...and this summed it all up nicely.

I think anyone who works with information, including librarians, software geeks, etc. would appreciate the ideas about how things are changing as we are increasingly able to manipulate information and put it in an order that makes sense to US, not necessarily how it "should" be organized.

When I was in library school, my catalogin...more

like · see review

Sep 23, 2008 Steven rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: information-science, nonfiction, science-technology

The internet has prompted a revolution in information science. This book is about the emerging methods of finding information. These methods are applied to locating music (iTunes), books (Amazon and WorldCat), real estate (Zillow and PropSmart), photographs (Flickr), encyclopedias of information (Wickipedia), used stuff of every sort (eBay), and the list goes on.

Weinberger sets for three orders of information. The first order is the arrangement of things (books alphabetical on a shelf, for examp...more

like · see review

title link	preview: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
avg rating	preview: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder Goodreads rating: 3.69 (1158 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/726004.Everything_Is_Miscellaneous?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1316738882l/726004.jpg[/img][/url] [url=https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/726004.Everything_Is_Miscellaneous?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger[/url]

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (1)

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Books by David Weinberger

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Everything Is Mis...

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

combineOther Editions (1)

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

Books by David Weinberger

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Everything Is Mis...

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (1)