As the end of the semester draws closer, we finally wrap up with Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. I know this book wasn't particularly popular with my classmates, but on the whole I rather enjoyed it.
Examples are difficult to come by for what amounts to a lot of concept and with very little practice, but I really enjoyed chapter nine, "Messiness as a Virtue". I agree with the notion that the Semantic Web - something I've been hearing about off and on for some time now - isn't going to be the protocol that ushers in the new era. It's not a bad idea, but that doesn't mean it's a good one, either - it seems like it would have been a wonderful notion to introduce ten years ago, but now it's way too late. The chaotic nature of the internet today is resistant to any attempt to introduce the kind of order that relies on authority, such as the proposed relationships of the Semantic Web. As Weinberger says on page 192, it uses "includes and describes but not owes money to or hates the smell of." What he doesn't really get in to is how well standard HTML works for that purpose, in the grand scheme. He notes in the next chapter that the system as it stands allows anyone to link to any page with any comment they please, but he doesn't mention that Google reads all these links when it indexes, and that's how it defines search terms. It's what gives us the ability to make Google bombs, and it's what makes Google so powerful - they don't return the results that they handpicked, they return the results that we the people defined for them.
One side note: On page 186, Weinberger talks about averaging the outlines of chairs and furniture, but I don't think he does a very good job explaining that this is something we can actually do. The example that stands out in my mind is the averaging of Playboy centerfolds by decade. (As you might guess, that link contains vaguely iconic representations of naked female forms; whether or not that's safe for work is up to you. I would not describe the images as at all explicit.)
As to chapter ten, "The Work of Knowledge", I just don't have a lot to say. I think he's completely correct in that we've redefined knowledge. Information on a topic is no longer limited by how important the topic is, but by how passionate people are about it (and about informing others about it). I think it is a great thing, and it is one of the reasons that makes the third order of order work. But it also has a tendency to undermine the credibility of some collaborative projects - consider the oft-mocked Wikipedia entry on Darth Vader, in all its absurdly lengthy glory, for an excellent example.
Still, I think it's an important aspect of the future of our cultural knowledge, and much like Weinberger himself, I am extremely excited to see where such things as Wikipedia and photo tagging will take us in ten years.
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