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Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

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One of the central ironies of David Weinberger's new book, "Everything is Miscellaneous", is that a book about classification is bound to suffer from classification problems. Reviewers and bookstore owners are inclined to think of David as a business writer because his previous books - The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined - were profoundly useful in helping businesspeople understand what this World Wide Web thing was really all about. But it's a mistake to consider David's new book solely as a business book.

Which isn't to say that reading Everything is Miscellaneous won't help you make a buck in world of Web 2.0. It probably will, as the issues Weinberger explores are core to any business that deals with information and knowledge... which is to say, virtually every industry you can think of. But "Everything is Miscellaneous" is also a philosophy book. It's about the shape of knowledge, and how moving information from paper to the web changes how we organize and how we think. And this means that Weinberger's book crosses from territory like Wikipedia and Flickr into Aristotle and Wittgenstein.

This would be a dangerous path for a lesser author to take, but David grounds his explorations in examples and interviews that are, as Cory Doctorow puts it, wonderfully miscellaneous. We bounce between the lives and ideas of taxonomers past - Linneaus, S.R. Ranganathan, and the wonderfully strange Melvil Dewi - and the librarians and software developers who are making sense of today's digital disorder.

At its heart, the book is about what happens when we liberate knowledge from the world of atoms. In the physical world, we can only organize books on a shelf in one way or another - books can't be in multiple places at once. Frequently we find ourselves reduced to ordering information in arbitrary ways as a result - AAAAA Towing Service gets more business through the phonebook than Mike's Wreckers through the unfairness of alphabetization.

Adding a layer of metadata to the physical world helps somewhat - card catalogs allow us to put multiple pointers to a single physical location so we can file a single book on Military Music under both "Music" and "Military". But card catalogs pale in comparison to the wonders of "third-order" metadata, the sorts of organization we're capable of in a digital age. A book listed by Amazon can be filed in any number of categories. It can be annotated with reader reviews, added to reading lists, enhanced with tags or statistically improbable phrases. The "card" in the card catalog can be larger than the book itself, and the full text of the book serves as metadata, as the book itself is searchable.

Weinberger argues that the fact that we tend to organize data in terms of its physical placement has consequences for how knowledge works. We tend to think in Aristotelian terms - objects are members of a categories, and share the same traits as other members of that category. We can organize these categories into trees: a robin is a bird, which is an animal. We can expect the leaves of trees to share the attributes of their branches, and we expect each leaf to fit onto only one, specific branch.

But that's not knowledge works in a digital age. When I bookmark a [...] it's to my benefit to add many tags to it, both because it makes it easier for me to find it again, and because it helps other people find it as well. Weinberger advises us to "put each leaf on as many branches as possible", building a tree that looks more like a hyperlinked pile of leaves.

This suggestion, along with advice to use everything as a label, to filter only when we need outputs, and to give up the idea that there's a "right way" to order things, serve as a roadmap for how to build tools and services in a digital age. But the magic of Weinberger's book is that this practical advice is also an invitation to explore categorization, language and knowledge itself. If knowledge is a pile of leaves instead of a tree, how does the shape of our knowledge change?

It's questions like this that make "Everything is Miscellaneous" deceptively deep. One moment, we're thinking about how we organize photographs in shoeboxes or on our hard drives, and a moment later we're asking whether we understand "shoebox" in terms of definitions, family resemblances or exemplars. It's a little like drinking a mojito - smooth going down, but deceptively powerful, and slightly staggering when you get up to buy the next round.

I've read the book twice now, and am looking to my third pass through it. Weinberger has done something rare and admirable here - he's written about a world I thought I knew well in a way that makes me realize that there are innumerable depths and implications left to explore.

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.

With a background in enterprise search, I'm inclined to think of David's book as required reading for those who doubt how vital meta-data and community tagging is to quality corporate search. In reality, it's about meta-data.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the book is about moving organization and retrieval of content - physical and virtual - from atoms to electrons. Office supply stores, libraries, and daily life are all limited by atoms: how much space there is in a store; what products should be displayed near other products; and what single specific shelf should a new book occupy given the Dewey Decimal system categorization.

In our increasingly virtual world, based on electrons, little of this matters - fax/copying/printer/scanners can be 'stored' under all of those categories, or a new book can be tagged with every possible related term, regardless of what category the librarian suggests. Web 2.0, Flickr, Wikipedia, Enterprise Search 2.0, all of our virtual worlds, will allow us to tag everything in any way that will help us find it again. And we can make it even better by opening the tagging up to a wider audience - friends, co-workers, even strangers - consider Amazon's suggestion system.

The book is a masterpiece and is a must-read for anyone involved in using - or designing - any part of our virtual and future world(s).

The core conceit of "Everything is Miscellaneous" is the "third-order of order". Here's how it works:

First-order is stuff. You put your stuff in places. Woo hoo. But where is my purple frog pither? DRAT!

Second-order is cataloguing or "stuff about stuff". You pick a few attributes about each bit of stuff and write them down with some location information e.g. a library card catalogue. Ideally so that later you can find bits of stuff with the attribute on the list. Yea team. But it can only be searched the way you made the catalogue. If I only remember the thing is purple and not that it is a pither, I can't look it up. Oh well.

Third-order is every bit of information that you (or anyone or everyone else) can think of about some other bit of information. A bit of reflection tells you that you cannot do this all at once (who'd remember? who wouldn't think of something to add later?) so it isn't suited for paper. So you put it on a computer. Great. Now you can search on "purple" or "frog" or perhaps "pointy" and get a list of things with that attribute.

What's particularly cool about this (and Weinberger doesn't explicitly mention it so maybe it's only cool to me) is that GIVEN cheap computers and GIVEN huge amounts of metadata, THEN the "third-order of order" is an emergent property. It's very useful but it also strikes me as incredibly obvious.

That's my first big problem with the book. It's not a bad book in the sense that it will make you dumber. Rather, it takes an obvious premise (hey! databases and lots of metadata let you organise spontaneously in lots of different ways!) and some useful advice (hey! giving your customers lots of metadata and the ability to manipulate that metadata is probably a good idea!) and covers it in a meandering 200+ page book rather than a focussed 10 page magazine article.

Now, that makes sense for Weinberger as books are more prestigious and (presumably) better paid than magazine articles. But I have a hard time imagining anyone who is already interested in the subject of classifying information learning anything from this book.

My other beef is that there is nothing but cheerleading for the "third-order" concept. It is a great thing (really!) but it isn't a uniformly excellent thing. There is no real discussion in the book about the problems of noise (as in signal-to-noise). There is a brief mention of the "anyone can make stuff up" problem with Wikipedia. But that seems to be it. If he'd spent some time discussing problems of the "third-order of order" and possibly strategies for dealing with it, this would be a much better book.

In Brief

As other reviewers have mentioned David Weinberger's new book is a hard book to categorize, which is also the irony, since it's central premise is about categorizing information. I place this book in the company of other books about the internet and information; Ambient Findability - Peter Morville, Wikinomics - Don Tapscott, Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler. To me it's about the changes wrought by current trends on the internet. Weinberger is deeply familiar with internet and all it's implications, since he is one of the original authors of Cluetrain Manifesto which was probably the first book to outline the game changing nature of the internet. Here he tackles how to cope with the seeming chaos of digital information that we are deluged with.

This is a thought provoking book and will make you look at organizing information in a different way. It will help you understand some of the current trends on the internet and put it into historical context.

Audience

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in internet trends especially as it relates to organizing information. If you are at all interested in the history of information and how we as humans have struggled to come to terms with the world, then this book is one of the best I have come across. It is well written and a pleasure to read.


Details

David Weinberger, internet visionary, has again synthesized an intellectual romp through another important topic - Information. We, humans, are obsessed with defining, categorizing and organizing information as our way of bringing some order to the chaotic world we live in.
Weinberger explores our obsession with information from Plato and Aristotle to our modern-day digital explosion of information.
He frames this exploration by defining 3 orders of organizing information:

1) 1st Order organization is of the physical world, manipulating physical objects and organizing them,
2) 2nd Order of organization is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints.
3) 3rd Order of organization is the world we live in today, as we move from the physical to the digital, organizing information becomes freed from physical constraints allows us to simultaneously define, categorize and organize information into a million different taxonomies.

The 1st and 2nd orders of organization are covered as Weinberger explores the history of our obsession with categorizing information; from Plato's `Joints of Nature', to Aristotle's `Trees of Knowledge'. We have been lumping and splitting information for thousands of years. Until recently we have been constrained by the laws of physics, it is hard for objects to be in two places. It is also hard to categorize the real world into orderly taxonomies i.e. what category does a duck-billed-platypus fit into?

The 3rd order organization is what Weinberger is referring to in his title, `Everything is Miscellaneous'. In a world where we can organize information any way we want, nothing needs to be categorized per-se and everything can live in a state of limbo in the miscellaneous category until we need it and then, and only then, does it need to be grouped, filtered, sorted for our immediate consumption.

The 3rd order world has freed information and people to categorize information anyway they want. It is no longer an academic exercise to come up with taxonomies. With tools like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr etc. we slice and dice the world of information to our personal needs.

Understanding this digital disorder we live in and how we cope is the ultimate point of this book. True to form, Weinberger has given us a wealth of information to ultimately understand where we are today and how to build the tools to cope in the future.

Key Take-Aways

You will come away from this book understanding the following:
- Our historical struggle to organize information from the physical to the digital
- That we live in a new reality where information is freed from its physical constraints.
- The world of information is now available to all of us and can now be organized any way we want.

Summary

If you enjoyed any of Weinberger's previous books (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces Loosely Joined) you will not be disappointed. This is a pleasure to read and will make you think - my two most important attributes when it comes to books. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in information and the current trends on the internet. Weinberger has been right on the money with his observations of the internet and this book is no different; organizing information in the age of the internet is an important subject. Read why there is more to information than search alone.

Kes Sampanthar
Inventor of ThinkCube

This book speaks to the aching sense of futility experienced by all you organizational freaks. The reason your office or computer desktop folders are never perfect, and as a result you are not perfectly organized, is that you have not had perfect tools. Alas, the world does not fit into nested folders and file drawers ... no matter how clever you name them. We've always intuitively known this but David Wienberger gets specific about it. Along the way you'll learn that the folks managing the Dewey Decimal System have a more frustrating (hopeless?) organizational/taxonomical job than you do ... so you should feel better (or at least you should not feel alone).

David Wienberger goes deep on what software and more generally the internet has done to help us organize knowledge in the world. He illuminates our movement from first order organization (the library shelf), to second order (creating a library card catalogue to find that book), to third order (collective development and meta tagging of information as found in online tools like flikr, delicious, wikipedia, and others). The book begins to describe how mankind will keep intellectual order given the explosion of constantly changing information. The short answer to that "how" question is: we will no longer simply put information into discrete real or virtual folders. Instead we will actually begin to create broad information about each element of information (meta-data). More importantly we will do this collectively and share it widely.

Wienberger's sense is that we are organizing the worlds information steadily into structures that actually better mimic how the human mind works. We are bringing our information toolsets closer to us and as a result are making information and knowledge more accessible and useful. Wienberger's implication is that we will all spend less time organizing and more time making use of information. Great news unless you're a compulsive obsessive organizer. Read this book to find out what's driving many things you see on the internet including meta tagging, wikipedia, flickr, google, digg, and beyond.

How (and why?) to categorize a book on "miscellaneous"? Info-pop page-turner, maybe? Think Blink but plumbing a deeper set of ideas. Or Freakonomics, but more unified, warm, and funny. Meant to be useful, it succeeds in being much more.

What is "miscellanous", when we mean that word in a good way? Big heaps of information, spread out all over the Internet so that its many bits get tagged by many people for different reasons. In the real world of atoms and spacetime. big messes are problems. But a big (virtual) heap of messy data is a good thing--and all the new ways we can add even more information into that mess will make it even more useful.

Hyperlinks! Playlists! Statistics! Messy folksonomies! The book (much less miscellanous than my review of it) whacks a much-needed path for a human brain into the hugely "intertwingled" confusion of new possiblities for understanding reality.

Now I must warn you about this book's bad side-effect. It is full of "aha!" moments that you'll start quoting to other people. And explaining to them. And since you will probably not explain these ideas with as much humor and clarity as the book does, their eyes may glaze over when you are just getting warmed up.

Even if your friends will stand still for your proud impromptu explanation of "Three orders of order," they will probably run when you threaten to read to them out loud its quotes and anecdotes.

That's OK. Just tell your friends to go buy their own copies.

I really don't understand what the negative reviewers could possibly have expected from a book about organizing information. I'm currently working on finishing up my Master's in Library Science (and taking my class on organizing information, no less!) With connections the average reader can understand and appreciated, Weinberger explains not only the significance behind the explosion in social tagging, but also the revolution this foments in the information industry. I won't summarize the book's point, as other reviews did that well. I will comment on its implications for education, another one of the top down, authority controlled institutions being threatened by the "common man as expert" phenomenon that is social networking.

We've known for a long time that classrooms ought to be student-centered, rather than teacher centered, but we're fighting hundreds of years of tradition. THe kind of miscellany Weinberger describes, when introduced to the classroom through wikis, blogs, and problem-based learning, transforms students into key players in their education, while teachers act as guide and reinforcer. Students work to find structure, make connections and draw conclusions based upon their own findings. Learning is relevant and memorable and skill-based, rather than content based. No wonder the academic, authority-driven powers that be are up in arms about this book!

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger, is a book about how we identify and organize information in the digital realm. It draws contrasts to methods previously used for hundreds and thousands of years in the physical world, before the advent of digital technologies.

From card catalogs, as drawers filled with index cards, to television channels, confined to radio frequencies, physical limitations have determined how we organize knowledge and information. A book is typically filed under two or three subjects, even though it may touch on a wide range of topics. An episode airs on a certain channel, at a certain time, regardless of when is convenient for the viewer.

The digital world breaks free from these restrictions, allowing information to be accessed instantly, and categorized in any number of ways. This unlimited ability to add metadata, information about information, yields the books title and allows everything to become miscellaneous. As Weinberger paradoxically notes: "The solution to the overabundance of information is more information."

The key to harnessing this power is being able to uniquely identify an object. On the world wide web, a URL serves this purpose. The URL of this review links to the book's URL on Amazon.com. These links form connections, which can be indexed and searched, adding metadata to the global database that is the Internet.

Everything is Miscellaneous sites examples of popular sites, including Flickr and del.icio.us, which allow tags (more metadata) to be applied to photos and bookmarks. As more people utilize these tools, social patterns emerge, adding additional relations that can be analyzed. This cycle builds upon itself, making it easier to find the information you are after.

As someone who is already immersed in the digital disorder, Everything is Miscellaneous reinforced concepts I'm already familiar with. For anyone who is curious or unconvinced about these technologies, the book would serve as a good overview.

Don't be bamboozled by David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Puffery on the outside, there's propaganda within.

A booster of Internet-enabled consumer-generated content, Weinberger hails all its new modes--social networks, tagging, folksonomies, wikis, mash-ups etc.--to argue that the Internet enables new bottom-up ways of organizing and creating knowledge. His two theses are irrefutable. First, information is getting chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. Second, the organization of information has escaped physical world constraints and control by experts and their institutions.

The net result: any one can now organize information any way one wants to suit one's own purposes and do so at any time for one's immediate use. From this potential Weinberger foresees though rose-colored glasses an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Excuse me but such a view has huge problems.

As Weinberger points out, the best grouping and sorting of information into knowledge is done by small groups not only online but also offline, as his own examples demonstrate. The Internet brings nothing special to this process. To be sure, the Internet does make it much easier to form groups and very much easier to form groups that include strangers and groups devoted to narrow topics. But a vast increase in quantity does not necessarily yield any improvement in quality, and although Weinberger is always careful to label such an outcome as "potential," I've yet to see any marked change in our ability to make sense of the world.

Nor is the appetite and aptitude for this activity suited to all. As any teacher who ever graded term papers will confirm, the ability to cut-and-paste information and turn it into knowledge is not innate. Even after some schooling, such a rudimentary skill is very far from universal. It is essential for the new occupational stratum of Information Age employees who manipulate words and numbers for their livings, but such "knowledge workers" are not Everyman. Presenting the abilities and interests of this or any other elite as those of everyone is the essence of ideology and shouldn't fool anyone.

Nor should anyone accept, much less applaud, Weinberger's cavalier dismissal of discipline and authority. He argues that knowledge should not have any shape and that deciding what to believe is now our burden. His laissez-faire alternative would have John and Jane Doe fend for themselves, finding and creating meaning from and among each other--link by link, tag by tag. Fortunately, this cannot happen because humans can only make sense of things, especially disconnected facts, through the frameworks of our inherited arts and sciences. Nor should it happen. The casual indifference to several millennia of human efforts to make sense of the world only leaves John and Jane in the post-modern void, unarmed and aimless.

There's a lot to be said in favor of consumer-generated content but to suggest that the fragmentation of knowledge and the cacophony of cyberspace will improve our ability to make sense and meaning of life is cybertopian bunkum.