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| Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder | 
 enlarge | Author: David Weinberger
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $7.62
You Save: $7.38 (49%)
New (42) Used (10) from $7.30
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 17742
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0805088113
Dewey Decimal Number: 300
EAN: 9780805088113
ASIN: 0805088113
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The way of the (Virtual) World May 4, 2007
22 out of 25 found this review helpful
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).
Much-needed book, but may turn you into a pest May 8, 2007
18 out of 22 found this review helpful
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.
 YAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!! June 23, 2007
16 out of 84 found this review helpful
I feel like Charlie Brown in that Lucy and the football scene. Finally ridding myself of all copies of Cluetrain Manifesto (skeet shoots, tied them behind my car & dragged them through the desert, held them under water till no bubbles were left), I accidentally bought this book. Dear God, there must be a 12-step program for idiots like me. Once again I got suckered in. DUMB stupid DUMB stupid DUMB stupid.
In a nutshell, friends don't let friends buy books by this guy.
Clearly. I have no friends.
Rancid Bouillabaisse May 31, 2007
14 out of 73 found this review helpful
One of the more unfortunate manifestations of the internet phenomena is the flatulent eruption of books purporting to tell us "What It All Means." This rancid bouillabaisse of cockamamie concepts, hare-brained hypotheses, and half-baked bromides is just the latest example of this sorry trend. If we lived in a more orderly society the purveyors of such errant nonsense would be hauled off to the nearest public square, given a sound horse-whipping for the edification of the general populace, and then be sent off to work in the lower echelons of the food-service industry. As it is, pontificating gasbags will continue to assault the senses of the reading public with odoriferous emissions like "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder." It's a sad world we live in.
deeply deceptive September 21, 2007
9 out of 19 found this review helpful
Pseudo-scientific ramblings that attempt to explain how new ways of classifying digital data will impact society. The book drags along quite a bit. Clearly this book is for "fans of Weinberger"--of whom there appear to be many. Save time and money by watching him speak with a powerpoint presentation on youtube.
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