Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

Started: April 5th
Finished: April 22nd 2012
Pages: 260

Everything is Miscellaneous features the kind of writing about the internet that's been driving me away from reading writings about the internet since....oh, about 1993.    You know the kind of thing.   The INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!!!   Everything internet is cooler and more revolutionary than anything invented anywhere anytime before, and everything non internet is....just hooey.  (insert additional exclamation marks here if you like.  I'm all out.)  Ho hum.  Sandy and I were forced to write a letter to As It Happens back during the 1997 election campaign to point out that political parties creating websites that were online versions of their party brochures ..... wasn't actually that significant.  And the only reason the letter was written in the first place was that I was sick and tired of the "INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING" then already.

So, why am I reading an "INTERNET CHANGES EVERYTHING" book in 2012?    Well, it didn't happen exactly on purpose.

One of my "resolutions" upon returning from Mexico was that I was going to give in and spend a bit more of my own time outside of work thinking about and reading about stuff that relates to my work.  I've resisted in the past because it seemed like yet another intrusion of work into my personal time.  But...I am interested in my work, and subjects relating to my work.  So I decided to change my attitude and resist less.

So when  Everything is Miscellaneous appeared as a must-read in an article from a professional organization and it was available from the library, I decided to give it a go.

The book does have a few core points that are interesting.  People invent taxonomies to bring order to knowledge.  Taxonomies help make sense of information by exposing important relationships between items.  However, items can usefully exist in multiple taxonomies because there are many many possible inter-relationships between any two items.  With digital copies, it's possible to add essentially unlimited amounts of metadata to any item, or even to treat the entire contents of a digital item as metadata in that you can categorize or search for an item by any element of its contents.  These two properties potentially give end-users the power to create their own taxonomies, or for taxonomies to emerge from the collective action of large groups of users who individually tag the digital items.  These "folksonomy" taxonomies can permit hitherto unsuspected relationships, or even purely personal relationships between items to become visible.  This can be powerful and useful, and could permit users of information to derive new levels of meaning from data.

Okay, fine.  But why did you have to spend most of the 260 pages at your disposal exclaiming that expertise was an obsolete concept, amongst other hyperbole?  For example, as the creator of technical data with an interested but limited audience (currently at a career level high in the thousands or even tens of thousands), this is interesting, but not decisive.  Jakob Neilson has found that perhaps 1% of users will be regular contributors to a site, and perhaps 9% more will contribute occasionally.  The remaining 90% simply consume the content. Who do you think would do a better job of tagging this technical content so that it can be easily found and used by others:  someone who has a pretty good idea of the overall scope of a particular subject area and the relative importance of its various parts, or a random collection of 10 people who happen to look at some subset of that information?  I'd argue that for collections of information with audiences smaller than that of Wikipedia, and where the consequences of failure are larger than a failed Wiki search, expertise can definitely add value. But that would make me boring and obsolete, apparently. Because with the internet, expertise is obsolete.  Unless it's contributed by someone on the internet, of course.  :-)

Okay, enough already.  An annoying book with a few kernels of interest.  Now if only someone would explain to me why books about the internet feel compelled to present their ideas in simplistic and bombastic ways.  I might enjoy reading a book about that.