The big contribution of "Everything is Miscellaneous", I think, is the concept of "orders". "First-order order" is structuring, like the placement of sentences in a text or products on a shelf. "Second-order order" is classification, putting information into categories and subcategories, maps,, etc. "Third-order order" is tagging and other meta-data, which allow us to make our own categorization on the fly ("give me a list of all books in this bookstore, divided by century published and subdivided by genre"). It's a neat set of phrasing, and if the book is not remembered for anything else, hopefully that taxonomy will remain.
Where the book falls short, though, is in its own "first-order order", its organization of ideas; which may be sadly appropriate for a book extolling "messiness". The book jumps from topic to topic, introducing ideas and people seemingly (to my mind) haphazardly, and in a way that makes it hard to keep track of all that has been covered. A better system of organization might have been chronological. After all, the full possibilities of tagging, or "third-order order", have only been enabled by computers and the Web. How much more interesting could it have been if we could see the progression of techniques for ordering and taxonomy through time, as a function of improving information technologies? Have there been pre-computer attempts at tagging? You can get a sense for some of these issues by piecing out the historical anecdotes Weinberger places, but it would have been easier to see them in a more natural order.
On that note, I also think Weinberger gives too little time to historical attempts at classification. The book does contain interesting examples of thoughts about categorization, from the ancient Greeks onward, but too often Weinberger stacks the deck against previous generations, by bringing in such loaded examples as apartheid South Africa's classification of races or psychiatrists' old definition of homosexuality as an illness. That unfairness extends even to book classification, where Weinberger talks at length about the badly-designed Dewey Decimal System, but ignores the Library of Congress system, which is nearly as old and much better-produced.
Blogs, on the other hand, get a lot more attention in the book than I think they should: they do not provide meta-data at all but rather commentary, and those two are not the same thing. Weinberger does not clarify that distinction, and in fact at one point asserts that "everything is metadata". That's not true in any rigorous sense, and I think just further confuses the issue.
On other current technologies I give "Everything is Miscellaneous" a mixed review. Wikipedia gets a prominent mention, as it should, but there's no discussion of categories within Wikipedia, which is the biggest effort at what could be called "collaborative tagging", as distinct from the standard web model of every user creating their own tags. And there's a nice discussion of the Semantic Web, but none of semantic wikis; Weinberger missed a chance to think a little ahead of 2007 (I'm speculating here a little bit).
For an information-science enthusiast like me, just about any discussion of classification is interesting; however, this book unfortunately does not provide a solid or clear overview of the theory of classification, instead getting caught up in what I see as Web boosterism. Yes, the Web has changed a lot about categorization, but not *everything* on the Web has done that.
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