Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6457 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-29
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.

From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.

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The Flocking of Information: An Amazon.com Exclusive Essay by David Weinberger
As businesses go miscellaneous, information gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. But it also escapes its leash--adding to a pile that can be sorted and arranged by anyone with a Web browser and a Net connection. In fact, information exhibits bird-like "flocking behavior," joining with other information that adds value to it, creating swarms that help customers and, ultimately, the businesses from which the information initially escaped.

For example, Wize.com is a customer review site founded in 2005 by entrepreneur Doug Baker. The site provides reviews for everything from computers and MP3 players to coffee makers and baby strollers. But why do we need another place for reviews? If you’re using the Web to research what digital camera to buy for your father-in-law, you probably feel there are far too many sites out there already. By the time you have scrolled through one store’s customer reviews for each candidate camera and then cross-referenced the positive and the negative with the expert reviews at each of your bookmarked consumer magazines, you have to start the process again just to remember what people said. Wize in fact aims at exactly that problem. It pulls together reviews from many outside sources and aggregates them into three piles: user reviews, expert reviews (with links to the online publications), and the general "buzz." (For shoppers looking for a quick read on a product, Wize assigns an overall ranking.) When Wize reports that 97 percent of users love the Nikon D200 camera, it includes links to the online stores where the user reviews are posted, so customers are driven back to the businesses to spend their money.

Zillow.com does something similar for real estate. The people behind Expedia.com, Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, were looking for a new business idea--and were in the market for new homes. After hunting for information, they found that most of it was locked into the multiple listings sites of the National Association of Realtors. Now Zillow takes those listings and mashes them up with additional information that can help a potential purchaser find exactly what she wants. The most dramatic mashup right now is the "heat map" that uses swaths of color to let you tell at a glance what are the most expensive and most affordable areas. At some point, though, Zillow or one of its emerging competitors will mash up listing information with school ratings, crime maps, and aircraft flight patterns.

Wize and Zillow make money by selling advertising, but their value is in the way their sites aggregate the miscellaneous--letting lots of independent sources flock together, all in one place.

We’re seeing the same trend in industry after industry, including music, travel, and the news media. Information gets released into the wild (sometimes against a company’s will), where it joins up with other information, and the act of aggregating adds value. Companies lose some control, but they gain market presence and smarter customers. The companies that are succeeding in the new digital skies are the ones that allow their customers to add their own information and the aggregators to mix it up, because whether or not information wants to be free, it sure wants to flock.

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From Publishers Weekly
In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break—they're already breaking—in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about "the third order of order" and "useful miscellaneousness." But the book's call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about "the newly miscellanized world." (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Think about how you organize your CD collection. Whether you're quirky or meticulous, once you pick a system, you're pretty much stuck with it. But in the digital world the laws of physics no longer apply. At iTunes you can sort music by any number of criteria, including artist, genre, song name, length, or price. The Internet itself is a hyperlinked web of information that we cruise organically, often finding ourselves far afield of where we started. Weinberger takes us on a journey through the human constructs of classification, from alphabetization through the Dewey decimal system, all necessary but limited approaches to organization that seem antiquated in the digital age. At places like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, an almost infinite ability to sort and combine objects and ideas produces results that range from the surprising to the ridiculous. This so-called third order mixes it all up; it's all about multiple connections and a realization that the world is not as orderly as we thought. Weinberger presents a thought-provoking and entertaining look at our rapidly evolving culture of data. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Customer Reviews

Hope For People Caught In The Endless Quest For A Perfect Filing System
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.

Entertaining and full of interesting information, but poorly organized
First, the criticism. Maybe it's just me. But I like a book that is organized. One where the author lays out the structure of the book, and then follows the structure. Where the skeleton carries and gives form to the flesh.

This book does not have that. Of course, there is some structure here. The book is separated into chapters. Each chapter has a title. The stories in each chapter have a relation to the chapter title. That gives some flow to the book.

But the structure is not nearly enough. Weinberger starts the book with a story. That starts a stream of stories that winds it way through chapter after chapter until the end. True stream of consciousness in action. Rambling.

Weinberger tells many interesting stories. The book is packed with facts. But how ironic for a book about order and organization to have such poor order and organization. That fault robs the book of much of its appeal. I got bored with the stream of conciousness, and twice had to put the book aside for a day or two to get to the end of it.

Maybe my background as a lawyer makes me look for strong organization. Briefs in litigation have to have a detailed table of contents tha lays out the whole argument of the brief. You get used to having organization like that, and it spoils you.

Others may find in Weinberger's book a subtle organization that appeals to them. Or perhaps, as Weinberger says in a different context, there is even power in disorder. Hard to say.

Second, the praise. Weinberger tells some great stories. The one I like best is about the Dewey Decimal System. Designing a system to organize all the breadth of non-fiction, Dewey chose a few major categories: philosophy, science and nature, history, the arts. As the world's knowledge has expanded, the categories have been stretched and in some cases, broken. But you cannot go back and start over. So we make do.

Even with weak organization, the stories Weinberger tells are interesting and inform. For me at least, the book's faults outweigh its favors. But not by much. If you like good story telling, give this book a read.

Based ojn bug misconception
interesting ideas but mostly cheer-leading for web 2.0. the book is at least somewhat worth reading in that he brings up key issues, even if his analysis of them is flawed.


most of the book is based strongly on an argument with a fundamental error in the premise. according to the author, card catalogs obey a strict organizational theme, but data bases do not. actually they do, and are in ways even stricter and more ordered. The computer essentially imposes order even in our "miscillaneous" groupings, which are just another label in the system.

the author argues for something like a "wisdom of crowds" but doesn't seem to fully grasp why that works. it's not that crowds simply don't need experts, but crowds that include a variety of kinds of experts, guess right more often than any single expert.


if his arguments are believed (and much about them is interesting) then this book should have been a blog. why wasn't it? probably the author knows the important differences, but writing about blogs got hiom a lucrative contract with a publishing house.