Notes from David Weinberger’s session titled “Miscellaneous Knowledge” (he retitled it “The Smell of Knowledge” – David is a pretty funny guy…)

We’re in an age of abundance – both good and bad stuff (ie., spam)

We’re used to our notion of “it’s hard to find good stuff” – not so hard anymore

We assume this – some knowledge is simple – it’s true for everyone – ex = some apples are red

Other assumptions:
- knowledge and truth is scarce (so institutions grow around this scarce knowledge)
- knowledge is orderly (everything fits neatly into categories, even one category)

This is not the case – ie., “is pluto a planet?” – it’s not orderly

we cluster things depending on what we’re doing at the moment – it’s not orderly – it’s personal and changing

Three orders:
first order – come up with a single way of ordering – stuff goes in a single place
second order – separate metadata from the thing – makes physical object  easier to find
third order – content and metadata becomes digital – no need to put stuff in one place anymore

In the third order:

1. leaf on many branches – ie., a camera can go in multiple categories (computer equipment, photographic equipment, graduation gifts, etc)

2. messiness is a virtue – all this stuff can link to each other, you can link it in many different ways to add value to it

3. metadata and data are merging – ie., you can search subject heading for Moby Dick – you can also search for “call me ishmael” – brings back same thing. You just used data as metadata… “everything is a lever”

Content is connection – Books are built as dead-ends – it’s difficult to make connections from one book to another. Digitally, this gets much simpler through links

4. unowned order – or personally-owned order. I can arrange it however I personallywant to – I don’t have to depend on others anymore

Cataloging – worked great in print. On the web, it simply doesn’t scale

Example – LOC added 3000 photos to flickr with the metadata they had – they allowed users to add tags, and they did. SOme photos ran out of tags – flickr allows 75 tags. So people left their tags in the comments.

LOC doesn’t have the time, staff, or expertise to tag these 3000 photos the way they’re being tagged – they needed user-generated tags

Nice slide – David added Wikipedia’s “the neutrality of this article is disputed” phrase to  a screenshot of the New York TImes… then asked – “why don’t we see this?”

A discussion list is smarter than an individual poster to the list. Knowledge exists through conversation, and is social.

Knowledge is becoming linked.

a blogger that links to other places tells people to “go away.” The hope is that readers will find that valuable enough to come back to you.

A newspaper is more narcissistic than a blogger – they point back to themselves most of the time – the rest are ads. Bloggers point away from themselves.

What happens to librarie? “I don’t know.”

“We all love books, but books really suck.”
- books aren’t convenient – you have to go get it, you can’t comment, you can’t share well.
- books have long-form arguments – it’s overrated. Hard to actually find books for that.
- books have content, but not links
- etc

What’s the “must” of libraries now? We can’t know this until we know what’s happening with knowledge – and we don’t know that yet.

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I just finished reading David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous (thanks, Brad!). It’s a great read – one that I highly recommend to everyone who reads my blog. You might not agree with everything in the book, but I guarantee the book will make you think.

First things first – Weinberger MUST know some librarians! Throughout the book, he mentions librarians… even some specific ones (ok, he even mentions Gorman and Blog People!). Weinberger also mentions card catalogs, FRBR, faceted searching (in relation to Endeca), DDC, and LCSH. He even quotes Ranganathan! So it’s definitely a “librarian-friendly” book.

Now, on to my main beef with the book. The title of the book, obviously, is Everything is Miscellaneous. And in most of the book, Weinberger tends to discuss first how something is either currently categorized or organized, and then how that organization or categorization has changed with web 2.0 tools and tagging specifically. How has it changed? According to Weinberger, allowing individuals to sort and tag information however they want equates to the world of information turning miscellaneous.

Interestingly enough, I agree with everything Weinberger says… but the term “miscellaneous” bugs me.

Instead of using “miscellaneous,” I’d use “personal.” In fact, I’d change the title of the book to Everything is Personal or Everything is Personally Relevant. Most of the information Weinberger describes as being miscellaneous isn’t actually haphazardly mish-mashed together (definition of Miscellaneous found using Google). Instead, the information, or the metadata at least, has been customized – or personalized – for “me.” Tags, searches, descriptions, customizations – all help to make the information personally relevant to me.

So… it might just be a semantics thing – I dunno. But I don’t see Weinberger’s miscellaneous pile of leaves (read the book – you’ll understand) as miscellaneous. Instead, I see it as opportunity. As something waiting to be discovered by me, tagged and described adequately enough that I can revisit it – which pulls it out of the miscellaneous pile and into my personally relevant, “I place you here” organizational needs.

And if my personal, sorted-through pile helps others (ie., tagging items in flickr), then great!

Update: Part 2 is here…

everythingismiscellaneous

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I posted about a social bookmarking survey a few days ago, and received this comment:

“I have no idea what social bookmarking is!!”

My explanation follows:

First, let’s define bookmarking… really easy. In your internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc – I’ll be using Internet Explorer for my example), there’s a Favorites menu. You can surf to your favorite website, click Favorites, then click Add Favorites, and add that website to a list of websites you might want to remember. That is a Bookmark.

The nice thing about the bookmark is that you can refer back to it any time you want to… well, except if you’re not sitting at that computer. Then you’re sunk.

Unless you use a Social Bookmarking service. Here’s the Wikipedia definition of Social Bookmarking (found using that handy google search, define: “social bookmarking”):

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. – a personal knowledge management tool en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Say what? OK – instead of merely bookmarking a website on one computer, you can bookmark that website on the web, using a free, web-based service like del.icio.us, Furl, or blinklist (included since they were mentioned in my original post). Why?

Well, your immediate problem of getting to the bookmarked website from another computer is solved. You just surf on over to your service, log in, and – voila – you have your bookmarks. Amazing!

But wait, there’s more… social bookmarking does much more than that:

• bookmarks are usually searchable, for one thing – so no browsing required.
• Other people can search YOUR links (hence the “social” part)
• You can usually search EVERYONE’S bookmarks – for example, Furl has a search engine that searches all Furl bookmark accounts (the idea being that these links MUST be good, since someone took the time to bookmark them)
• You can categorize them (aka tagging, folksonomy) – handy for organization
• Furl allows you to see the date you entered the bookmark, rate the bookmark, and see how many views your bookmarks get (sorta funny – my three top views? Yahoo! Webmessenger, Men’s Business Attire, and chords to a song – go figure)
• Some services, like del.icio.us, show top bookmarks, new bookmarks, and popular tags – great way to see what’s going on in the digital world
• Big one – using an RSS feed, you can SUBSCRIBE to someone’s bookmark feed. Why is that cool? Let’s say you find someone’s bookmark list to be extremely useful – if you subscribe to it via RSS, you know when that person has updated their list (it’s a time saver for you)
• With a little coding know-how, you can place del.icio.us feeds on another website. This is cool for reference librarians – they can maintain a list of links, but also allow patrons to subscribe to that list of links. And it’s not hidden way beneath a library’s website – it’s out there for the world to see (and subscribe to)

That’s what Social Bookmarking is, in a nutshell. Much more useful than Favorites, and way cooler, too.

social bookmarking

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Djoeke, the Community Manager for blinklist.com (a social bookmarking company), is doing a survey on social bookmarking, and thought it would be dandy if I linked to the survey. So here’s the link. They’re hoping for 1000 responses.

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