false 726004 0805080430 9780805080438 408 114 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177691395m/726004.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/726004.Everything_Is_Miscellaneous_The_Power_of_the_New_Digital_Disorder 46222 David Weinberger 522 132 3 5 false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat Aug 04 14:55:28 -0700 2007 Fri Aug 31 07:33:50 -0700 2007
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.

The attitude that librarians don't realise that virtual items can have 360 tagging is nonsensical in the extreme. The barest conversation with any cataloguer (I was one once myself) will make that clear. Librarians continue however to have to manage *physical* items, which is why we continue to use subject headings and classification. Digitised materials can be and are managed in quite different ways. That Weinberger doesn't realise this is a failure of his imagination.

If everything is miscellaneous, then nothing is meaningful. And that, too, is patently absurd. Sites such as flikr and delicious are using rankings of number of links, recommended links. Emergent tagging itself depends on people deciding for themselves that some things *aren't* miscellaneous, and assigning significence, preferring some terms over others, and building meaning by consensus.

Directed folksonomies may well be the way of the future, but they are anything but miscellaneous.]]>