Product Description

Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world - in which everything has a place - are upended. In the digital world, everything has its places, with transformative effects: Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable; There's no such thing as "too much" information. More information gives people the hooks to find what they need; Messiness is a digital virtue, leading to new ideas, efficiency, and social knowledge; Authorities are less important than buddies. Rather than relying on businesses or reviews for product information, customers trust people like themselves.With the shift to digital music standing as the model for the future in virtually every industry, "Everything Is Miscellaneous" shows how anyone can reap rewards from the rise of digital knowledge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164654 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
"* "Perfectly placed to tell us what's really new about [the] second-generation Web." - Los Angeles Times"

Customer Reviews

A chatty introduction to the subject
I found this very disappointing. I guess it depends what your expectations are, and I didn't expect what this book delivered. It's chatty, anecdotal, long-winded and theoretical. It reads like the lecture notes for a basic class on information management for general students. I found it long on observation, short on analysis and entirely impractical.

This may be what you want, in which case go for it. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely one for the generalist. If you already know anything about classifying information then there'll be little in it that's new except for a few stories.

If you are new to the subject and have a train journey to occupy then go for it. If you want a how-to guide then you'd be much better off with Patrick Lambe's book: Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

Great book if you are interested in information
I got this book because I saw on a friend's blog she was reading it.
It is a great book and I have started citing things from it, for a while I was referring to it as the "book on tagging" but it is much more than that, it talks about the way information is organised and the problems such organisation brings with it.
The final words are:
"The world won't stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours".
I have one gripe with the book it is written from an American point of view and assumes that the reader is also American. For example near the beginning it talks of "the Civil War", now lots of countries have had such strife, England had one back in the 1600s, Spain had one in the 1930s, and there are many others.
Not with standing that I do recommend reading it if you have any interest in information and how it is ordered.

Great small work on information organisation
This book is really nice as a primer and fresh-up on how information is organized and what it means to us. It explains old organization methods, like the one the libraries use and the organization of organisms that was introduced by Linnaeus. It then compares those 'atom based' organization methods with the new ones we can perform with digital means. Of course Amazon is mentioned where everybody has basically his or her own version of a bookstore.

Worth reading if you are interested in taxonomies, ontologies, information organization and categorization.