Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Jay drew my attention to David Weinberger’s new book: Everything is Miscellaneous. It came out at the beginning of May and if you click my link to Amazon you can peek inside and get a contents list (and, of course, buy it if you want to).
I am aware that, sometimes, what I know instinctively, but I have no real justification for believing is suddenly articulated in ways that I could only have dreamed about. Well this is one of those Ah! Ha! moments. Weinberger crystallises all those points about the way we try to build order in our world and finds a justification for the people like me who were NEVER destined to be Librarians and whose order is, at best, a temporary shore against the ruins. (I don’t think TS Eliot would have liked this book). It celebrates the disorder of the online world and links this to natural patterns of human knowledge acquisition. Information is at its most potent when it is thrown in a big digital pile and is filtered and organised by us users. I suddenly feel normal!
There is a blog site built around the ideas from the book and Google has published a lecture Dave gave to them as part of its TechSeminar series which is fascinating for every one of the 57 minutes it runs. Watch out for the unintended Paris Hilton pun. Click here to watch it.