It's this years' "Long Tail" – the new book about how the Internet is shifting boundaries and distributing power. The book is called "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder." David Weinberger, who touted the takeover of the geeks in an earlier book he co-authored with Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto", has definitely hit the sweet spot this time.
Weinberger posits that we have entered into a third order, in terms of how we deal with ordering information. The first order is simply the physical organization of stuff – you have a bunch of books and you organize them according to theme. The second order brings in taxonomy. You start to develop classifications – meta-information about what is organized. So you have a bunch of books and you have a card catalogue. In the third order, the information has escaped all limits. The books at Amazon.com are more or less miscellaneous in their location. They don't need to be stacked in any section. The end user provides the taxonomy (or categorization) and hunts the books out. This is what's happening with all of our information. One of the tech guys at Wikipedia told Weinberger that he couldn't explain where a topic is located on his site. It isn't located. No matter how popular or obscure the topic, it is equally miscellaneously out there in wikipedian cyberspace along with everything else.
Resultantly, the end user supplies the taxonomy, makes the connections, and supplies the meaning. You might say that he or she strolls up to an infinite buffet of potential information, and chooses her "a la carte" combination plate in each and every circumstance.
But when I recently interviewed Weinberger for my NeoFiles podcast, he wasn't completely satisfied with the "a la carte" notion. For Weinberger, a la carte is only about an individual's selections. He related the metaphor to Negroponte's '90s concept that net dwellers would order up personalized news/information packages that could be called "The Daily Me." But Weinberger thinks that we are also – and more profoundly – gathering from the miscellaneous chaos of information through conversation and connection. We are engaged through social networks, blogs, del.icio.us lists, ad infinitum. We lead each other towards the stuff we want or need, and we start to notice and make meaning together.
It's also a six degrees of Kevin Bacon Virtual world in which everything links to everything else within six clicks. Location, to the extent that there is a location – a branded website perhaps – doesn't much interest us either. It is only the stuff that we can pull out of the miscellany that gets our attention. The only trusted "brand" is our circle of virtual friends – those with similar interests (or maybe , Boing Boing)
Everything is Miscellaneous
Everything is Miscellaneous Blog
My Interview with David Weinberger (sorry for the Skype fuzziness)
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