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
(and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Stes 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.
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 her-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 s 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 " 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 s, 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.
