The following review is by “Yaron” from amazon.com:

“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.”

I’m not sure he does, either. Even the people in the audience with “pre-Cluetrain” gigs were scratching their heads…

http://burningbird.net/connect.....thorities/

“Let’s disregard for a moment that both have books to sell…no, let’s not disregard that they both have books to sell. What struck me most about both the video and email debate is that their central point of disagreement is about the importance of authority, but both are living examples of each other’s arguments.

Andrew Keen is fundamentally a non-authority arguing for the importance of authority on the web; while David Weinberger is an acknowledged authority on the emergence of a non-authoritative new world order. They could save time if, in a debate, they would just point to each other as a living example of what each is promoting. The audience can then get to the beer that much more quickly.”

I guess we’d do ourselves a favor if we shifted the debate towards these issues… in other words, towards the moon and not towards the finger that points at it.

:)

Meanwhile–I love this–BoingBoing is blushing that Keen praised them during your dustup! http://www.boingboing.net/2007.....plime.html

I pity the person who has to depend to on the mass media for his or her interpretation of the world. It’s the same mass media that gives us the National Enquirer and daytime TV drivel, both not mentioned by Mr. Keen in his defense of the old status quo.

My own sense is that as a professional I am good at what I do and sometimes a poor excuse for a human being. As a professional many of us live in one of the “iron cages” that Max Weber describes, held in place by a business model, a business plan, an org chart, a supervisory mechanism, a regulatory mechanism, a public relations dept, a corporate style guide, a dress code, an annual performance review, a mid-year check point, a salary and bonus incentive system, a code of civility, and on and on. As an amateur, well, then all bets are off. I am far more interested in what a Pundit thinks as an amateur, off the record, talking with a few close friends over a beer than I am in the talking points the Pundit iterates on Company Time or in the Corporate Media at the behest of their Supervisor and their Funders. Another name for professional is hireling. That was Jonathan Swift’s word. Another name for amateur is “citizen.” The web is a citizen-driven public space. To make it a medium for rich, branded, professional, corporate controlled, content would be a true tragedy of the commons.

Web 2.0 has been some individuals’ and groups’ way of reasserting a “dot com”-style soundbyte idea about the World Wide Web. It seems like Keen is focued on that soundbyte–which is neither the ideas of the web nor the people amongsts those ideas.